Among the Stars

Chapter Eighteen

By Roofles

“Out of all the possibilities, out of all the choices you could’ve made, you chose these. While creative, and something I have never seen done by a previous host before...” Zarvarsh said as Isaac stood there in the sands before him. It felt like the very sands underneath his feet were trying to pull him under, his footing slipping away as he faced The Time Devourer. “It was ultimately boring.”

“I know.” Isaac replied as if he were in front of his father. Hands tucked behind his back, chin up, chest out and shoulders back. Standing at attention while this thing critiqued his choices.

“You had endless possibilities! Endless opportunities! And you chose… to do the same thing, all over again.” The jackal blinked one eye then the other in a slow, lazy manner as he let out a sigh. “Disappointing, even if original.”

“Sounds like me.” Isaac answered without snark. “I… had to. I had to do it.”

“If you didn’t? You’d never have met. Possibly, heh.” The Jackal seemed to understand what Isaac was going for. “You did the exact same thing as you’d done previously. Every second accounted for. Every motion, every move. You repeated everything flawlessly as if you’d practiced your entire life for this dance.”

“In a way, I have.” Isaac gave a single nod, not even bothering to lift his head after.

“Right… I will never be able to understand you mortals.” Zarvarsh gave an exaggerated stretch, scratching under one arm as he rested back, looking up at the sun above. The single sun. Where there had been three, only one remained. “Time keeps ticking by, no matter what we do. Most struggle and fight and regret… they have so many regrets,” Zarvarsh dipped a hand into the sands as if it were made of water and let the grains fall between his open fingers. “So many regrets that they could fill a sea…”

“I know.” Isaac wondered if that’s what all these tiny grains of sands were. Regrets. Pieces of those who had tried countless times before him to change things. In a way, they had helped Isaac figure out what to do. “That’s why I didn’t change anything.” He said looking up at the Jackal who lazily watched him.

“Oh?” Zarvarsh wondered what he meant. For despite his appearance, Zarvarsh The Time Devourer wasn’t mortal. He wasn’t of this reality. He could only pretend. To take the appearance of something familiar, to act as if he could begin to understand or comprehend the going on inside one of these creatures, these beings with such limited time.

“Every step I took led me to him,” Isaac wanted to reach up and touch the jacket over his shoulders. Cyclone had remained quiet since they entered this place, and Isaac understood it was best to leave some things out from Zarvarsh for fear of what he would do. “And I… and I wouldn’t be myself, who I am today, without those regrets. Those mistakes. These choices I’ve made. People always say ‘oh, if I could go back and time and change something…’ but then, would they? If you change the past, you change the future… and not always for the better. Maybe you didn’t marry to woman you were after. Maybe you get hit by a car instead of your loved one?” Isaac shuddered at the dark thought. “Replacing something that… that is doomed to happen, with yourself. Taking their place. For those things? Heh, they are events in our life that shape who and what we are destined to become. Not fate, but who we choose to be? Is thanks to those… those canon events that happen to us.”

Isaac wasn’t sure why he was crying as he looked up at Zarvarsh.

“Even you.” Isaac said.

“Me?” Zarvarsh cracked a smile that spread over his face, taking up the entire side of it. “You think-,”

“The jackal you inhabit. The anchor that keeps you here.” Isaac said, looking around at the distant glass walls of the hourglass. “This place might be your prison but the thing that anchors you isn’t it. Isn’t the hourglass, but Zarvarsh the Jackal warden that watched over your hourglass…”

The Jackal went unnaturally still and silent as he stared at the Terran.

“You might’ve hated him. Despised him for keeping you contained… but then why take his appearance? Oh, maybe to mock him at first. To take a jab at the bastard who kept you trapped in here or…” Isaac didn’t like to presume things, but sometimes you had to to figure out something others rather keep secret. “Or maybe you miss him.”

“Enough.” Zarvarsh words were deep, making the sands around them shake.

“You kept his appearance despite all the time that passed?” Isaac felt he needed to push it further, for despite being the hourglass current host. Zarvarsh was not one to be meddled with lightly. That was why, despite everything Isaac had done, he’d ended up back here.

It was a parasite. This place. It fed off him. His time, his actions. It nourished itself by him being here. It would not so easily let him go.

“Is that why you became obsessed with Cyclone and myself?” Isaac asked a question he already knew an answer to.

“Careful,” the ground began to sink where Isaac stood. Caving in on itself as the hourglass sands poured from the upper levels to those below. Filling up rapidly as the endless rolling dunes around them began to shrink, showcasing the ancient lost ruins underneath their surface.

Of a race of people long since forgotten.

“Are you even capable of love? Not just romantically, but familiar love? Sibling love? Neighborly love? Anything of that?” Isaac pushed and pressed, twisting the metaphorical knife harder.

Isaac was the current host. It couldn’t just devour him. It needed him to play along with this sickening game. To trick and convince Isaac to keep using the hourglass so each time he went back, Zarvarsh could devour another piece of himself.

And in turn, become more real. Part of this reality. Devouring those within it to create a form that could exist beyond the boundaries of this hourglass.

“You took his shape and form, so you wouldn’t forget it. Forget him. Did you talk? I could only imagine how long he watched over you. Maybe he was the one to talk to you.” Isaac said, watching the Jackal ear twitch. “You, trapped away, and a young Jackal guard ordered to watch you. Sealed in that place you were kept. One thing people never seem to understand, is how boring it is… to remain stagnant. No matter how much time passed, he must’ve gotten tired of. So, he began speaking. Talking. Maybe not to you, no… not at first. He spoke to break up the tedium of it all. To stand there on guard in a place he thought no one would find.”

Isaac could almost see it now as the sands continued to pour away. Structures and buildings, massive broken pyramids and ancient tombs. Places of rest, of remembrance. Or, in Zarvarsh’s case, a place to forget. A place to hide something away.

“I won’t begin to understand all you’ve been through… but I have a feeling that was why you chose Cyclone.” Isaac looked back at the Jackal. “To try and see if it were possible to change things. To change the past, to save a loved one. Oh, I’m sure the two of you hated each other… but you miss him all the same.”

“And if I do? If that is what these strange, foreign feelings are…?” Zarvarsh looked down at his hand. It was an anamorphous blob of black ooze before quickly reforming into that of a Jackal’s hand. He turned it over, to make sure every detail was perfectly recreated. “I cannot understand it. These feelings, this pain. I should be rejoicing, that he is gone. That their entire accursed race is gone!” He let out a loud laugh that split his head in two, showing off far too many teeth. “Every last one of those bastards! Gone. Gone… gone…” Each time he said it, one of the nearby structures crumbled.

Broke apart and fell away, becoming grains of sand. More regret to fill this dry sea that Zarvarsh was trapped within.

“It was the queerest of things,” Zarvarsh noted, looking up at the ceiling. “Like being trapped. Trapped in a jar and looking up at the one keeping you there. Oh, I hated him. I hated all of them. Every last one of those bastards. Tricked me, lied to me, promised me a place here, amongst them. A part of them. They were the ones to come to me, first…”

Isaac only listened without words, giving Zarvarsh a chance to talk for a change.

“They wanted me to erase their regrets. To help them achieve kingdoms! People claim it was the Tigeron’s that destroyed them. Partially, that’s true. It was the arrogant Pharoah at the time that wanted to circumvent death itself that ordered his men, his people, into building and constructing this.” Zarvarsh motioned around to the hourglass they were contained within. “Compressed space. A piece of space itself, forcibly contained. They brought me over, offered me a place at their side. At the time, I was so foolish and naïve. I didn’t understand the thoughts of mortals. Curious? Was that why I chose to do something so… stupid…?”

“Or lonely.” Isaac understood what that was like. “You just… didn’t want to be alone.” Isaac could only imagine what that would be like. To be within the void sea, but still conscious. It would be like floating in nothingness. No noise, no light. No people, nothing. Absolute nothingness.

It made him shiver again.

“It doesn’t matter. I chose that, they trapped me here and began using me like some genie in a bottle.” Zarvarsh let out a cruel laugh. “Oh, I granted their wish. Their desires. And in turn, I ate them. Piece by piece. Nibbling away at them without them ever knowing. Not until it was too late…”

“Sounds like they deserved it.” Isaac said, carefully keeping an eye on the void creature before him. Zarvarsh was far older than anything Isaac had ever met or seen before. He doubted even The Monolith compared to such an ancient being as The Time Devourer was.

“You have no idea. The cruelty they showed their people, to the people they captured… Oh, they loved that. Hunting other races and capturing them. Turning them into slaves to build their ridiculous temples and structures,” Zarvarsh said with a bored tone, slumping against an arm and looking around at the crumbling structures. “Nothing ever lasts.”

“No…” Isaac agreed, feeling as if Zarvarsh was talking about something else rather than the elaborate structures around them. “Life is so… fleeting.”

Zarvarsh didn’t reply to that. Just stared to the side.

“So…” Isaac was hoping to get out of here. Before he could start, Zarvarsh spoke up again.

“He was an idiot. A fool. Just like me. Tricked into being my guard,” the Jackal suddenly said. “He didn’t understand what he had been tricked into agreeing to. To watch over me. To guard me. Stationed there until the day he died. They planned to wrap him in bandages, to turn him into something called a mummy… so that even in death he’d watch over me.”

Zarvarsh went distant again. Seeing things Isaac couldn’t. Places and times that Isaac hadn’t even been born into yet.

“He was so loud. So annoying. Talking endlessly. He was young and thought he was invincible. That this position would change things for him. A no name loser that would get promoted…” Zarvarsh continued to tell a tale about a man long since gone. “No one would remember him. He’d be swept away by the winds of time and that’d be that…”

“You remember him.” Isaac noted. The Jackal’s ear flicked.

“Why is that?” Zarvarsh asked. Isaac wasn’t sure how to answer him. “I hated him. I despised him and his people. Everything about them. Trapping me in here? Looking down on me? Using me for their own vanity and greed… I don’t remember any of them. The Pharoah-Kings or Queens? The people? The high-ranking officials? I don’t remember any of them, not any longer… yet, I still remember him. Why is that?”

“Do you… can you not understand?” Isaac asked and Zarvarsh turned to look at him. The action made Isaac’s skin crawl. “IS that another reason why you did this to… to us? To your previous hosts. To try and understand something so… simple?”

“Why is it?” Zarvarsh touched at his chest, unsure where to place his hand. “Where does this pain come from? This… this emptiness. Cyclone, that Saberwolf, felt something similar to it, yet different. If I devoured him, I should understand it? I don’t. I still don’t… only that pain. Tasting his pain, experiencing that pain, helped me understand… what?” He looked up at Isaac who couldn’t find an answer for such a thing.

For no matter how many Zarvarsh devoured, how many The Monolith copied, or how much Cyclone acted like Typhon… they’d never be truly “real.”

“Because you aren’t real.” Isaac muttered aloud, thinking it over as he tried to grasp the depths of those very words. “You loved the Jackal. Not as a lover, no… but as a friend, maybe. An acquaintance? Waking up the next day, only to discover he wasn’t there. Reaching for the spot he should’ve been and coming up with… nothing. A void left where there should’ve been something… real. To grasp onto… an anchor.” Isaac said, beginning to understand some concepts of the void itself. “Just as Cyclone used me as his anchor, to keep him… grounded and real.”

“All I need is an anchor then? To fix this… pain?” Zarvarsh questioned.

“Oh, no, Zarvarsh… that emptiness, that pain inside? You can’t…” Isaac fist tightened. “You can’t replace that. Not when it’s… real. Not truly. There are things you can do to… cope? To live with that pain? To make each day slightly easier…” Isaac wasn’t sure what he’d ever do, though, if something happened to Typhon.

To wake up one day, to reach over, and to feel only the emptiness left behind where he should’ve been.

Each day, every day, the smallest of things were the best. Breakfast, a cup of coffee shared together. Familiar words spoken, goodbyes exchanged with a hug or a kiss. Little things like knowing you’d see them again that night. You’d text throughout the day, you could call during lunch.

Little things that once gone? Left the biggest of holes that could never, truly, be filled again.

“Not even if I go back?” Zarvarsh question and Isaac just looked at him.

“You can relive the past without needing to go back in time. That’s what memories are. Pictures, photographs, videos?” Old TV shows or songs on the radio. “Memories get attached to things. Smells that remind you of events for so many years ago. A sound that brings you back in time, without ever needing to time travel.” Isaac wanted to laugh at that as he covered his mouth with a hand, trying to not break down on the spot. “The best we can do is try and create as many wonderful happy memories together before…”

“Before what?”

“Before The End…” Isaac rubbed over one eye. “I’m going to die so much sooner than Typhon will… I can only hope to create as many memories as possible for him to hold onto, to relive without ever needing to… to do what I did.”

“Future memories?” Zarvarsh thought that over, picking between his fangs with a sharp clawed finger. “I wonder how those will taste. If those tastes will fill this empty pit inside.” The Jackal looked at Isaac. “It’s always a pleasure to chat with you. Most just make demands of me or try and trick me. So very few ever… listen. Not like you… not like he did…”

“Zarvarsh!” Isaac stepped forward, reaching out but he already felt the tug on his legs as the sands pulled him down.

“It was a pleasure to meet you. For what little time it was, I felt like I already gained a lifetime of experience.” Zarvarsh snapped his fingers and Isaac’s legs disappeared underneath the swirling pool of sand. A whirlpool that was quickly pulling him under. Quick sand that was taking him away.

“Zarvarsh!” Isaac cried out, reaching up towards the Jackal looking down at him.

“We won’t meet again. Goodbye, Isaac Mayhew of Terra Two.” Zarvarsh almost looked sad to say those words, for he knew what the future held. “You almost make me feel… regret, for what I did to your lover.” He smirked. “Almost.”

The sands picked up, pulling at Isaac’s sides as his arms tried to keep him from sinking away.

“It’s funny. Having all the time in this world, this universe,” the Jackal tilted is head towards the artificial blue sky above. “All the time in the world… and still, it never feels like it’s enough.” Closing his eyes, the Jackal simply waited for the inevitable to come as Isaac slipped beneath the sands surface and was swallowed away.

The sensation of sinking was replaced by the sensation of falling.

Isaac opened his eyes to darkness. It moved around him, carrying with it a heavy weight that threatened to drag him under, further within beneath the surface above.

He couldn’t breathe. He could barely think as panic set in. As he clawed and swam towards what he assumed was the surface, trying to breach it to the light of fresh air above, panic was setting in. Isaac wanted to call out. Call out for the only one who ever listened.

“Typhon!”

It was like being underneath the ocean. A silent, dark ocean that had never seen the light of a star.

As he swam, he saw it. Fish swimming around him without eyes, with too many fins and gills in the wrong places. Tentacles that squirmed and moved like a squids, propelling them forward towards no destination in mind. They swam around him, swimming blindly in the dark. Lost and forgotten remnants of others. Something Isaac was threatening to become if he stayed down here, in this place.

He needed something, someone to anchor him to that surface. To the light above.

Struggling, fighting against this inevitable fate threatening to drag him down and crush him.

As his hand reached out, someone took it. A fur covered paw that engulfed his hand with their own. Claws brushed his wrist as, with a tight hold, they pulled and dragged him towards that surface. Away from this sinking pit threatening to swallow him away.

The water around him clung to his body. Hands forming to take hold of his torso and legs. Trying to drag him down with them. The fish swam closer, circling around them. Wanting Isaac to become one of them. Misery that loved company. To know their suffering and, in turn, hopefully remember these forgotten memories, echoes of the past.

Blue light shined and the fish retreated from it’s source. Feeling the harsh, bright touch of something so…. Warm, in this cold dark bottomless sea.

“Isaac!” That name alone grounded the Terran. Keeping him from slipping away into the nothingness around him. It anchored him as he reached out with his other hand, grabbing hold of the arm as it pulled again. “Isaac, don’t leave me.”

Isaac wasn’t sure when that was said as he felt himself being dragged to the surface.

“You promised!” There was the sound of something wet, dripping, onto this bleak ocean’s surface. Dripping, dripping dripping…

Only then, did Isaac realize what that sound had always been. The sound of dripping.

Tears. Tears falling as a sniffling Saberwolf tried to hold him tighter, to never let him go and Isaac knew, in his very heart, who that had always been.

“Typhon.”

The goo broke apart, it bubbled and sizzled as Typhon’s electricity coursed through the pool of tarlike substance that Cyclone had puked out over Isaac’s body. It had engulfed the Terran. Surrounding his entire body and being. Letting him sink into the nothingness that threatened to erase his existence from this reality and became a part of the endless void sea…

That was until Typhon punched Cyclone in the face. Knocking the mechanical Saberwolf aside before diving head first into that black sludge he’d been spewing out. It clung to Typhon’s arms and face. It pulled at him, fighting against him. Rejecting and accepting him in a chaotic mess that would’ve driven anyone else mad. Resisting his attempt to rescue Isaac, while accepting him into its dark embrace.

It was and wasn’t alive. It reacted to Typhon and Typhon reacted to it. Two natural forces of nature itself within the cosmos, forever at odds with each other. In an Endless War.

“Typhon,” it whispered to him. Calling him with his mother and fathers voice. Familiar broken memories that fed off his pain and sorrow and rejection. Feeding off all his struggles and regrets. Growing and festering as it-

With a howling rage Typhon tore it apart with his claws that sparked with neon blue energy!

“Let him go!” Typhon howled. “I will not let you have him!” Claws glowed with neon blue light as they ripped at the darkness. Ripped apart the substance that shouldn’t have a body or mass. It shouldn’t exist and somehow it did.

He tore it apart like scraps of wet, moving fabric. It pulsed with unnatural life and his body, his core, the shard of energy inside his chest reacted to it. Violently crying out with thunder! Crashing with lightning! Energy and light that poured from his body as Typhon unleashed it.

A volatile reaction from two opposing forces as Typhon’s Celestial light burned the dark pit of Cyclone away. He felt himself slipping into it, apart of it in his desperate attempt to rescue Isaac. Slipping, falling… falling… falling into the dark pit with no bottom.

Times and places shot past him. Echoes of things that had already happened. Echoes of things doomed to come. Memories like a movie screen played as he dove into it. Typhon diving head first into the mess. Swimming down, deeper and deeper as the cosmic energy inside him protected the Saberwolf from drowning within.

“Typhon…” The memories made his ears perk.

“You’re so… no that’s not… I’m so happy you’re here.” Memories of places, of people that Typhon didn’t know or care about. Then there were others that pulled his searching gaze away as he floated in the endless sea around him.

The blue bubble of crackling energy, the only thing that kept him whole here in this place.

“It’s not your fault.” A hand touch. A hospital bed within a cabin by the shore. A man that smiled at him in their last moments.

Meeting him for the first time at The Academy. Yet, Typhon wasn’t himself. His point of view was lower and someone else was moving him, yet, there before him was the very person he’d been searching his entire life for without ever knowing it.

Struggling as much as he had. They kept getting back up, after every time they fell over. An admirable sight. Something that would, and did, encourage Typhoon, the young Saberwolf, to get back up after every drill the Saber war council put him through.

The beatings, the pain, the struggles… the struggles… the endless struggles.

“Isaac…” Typhon knew who that was. That stranger beyond the stars. For, inside, he had always known as if a single red thread connected them together. “No matter how far apart we are, or how distant we may become.” Holding that feeling close to his chest, Typhon let it slip out. “I’ll always find you.”

Threads of electricity spun around him, drifting in the weightless dark sea around him. Thousands of threads, thousands of possibilities. Futures? Events? Choices to be made? All of them didn’t matter for Typhon only ever had needed one to hold onto. Only ever needed that single one thread, that single one possibility to help guide his future.

Reaching out, he took hold of a single thread that stood out amongst the rest. Without even needing to look, Typhon knew the second he touched it that it was the correct one.

Taking hold of it, the rest of the threads faded away. A choice made, Typhon opened his eyes and swam where the thread led him.

“…my dad’s the same way. Never gives me a break. It’s not like I’m failing it’s just…” More memories drifted by him as eyeless fish blindly swam in the dark. Searching for the light that Typhon had finally found. “It’s supposed to be popcorn -. You’re supposed to eat it, not whatever that was!”

The laughter made Typhon’s chest feel lighter and he kicked his legs faster. Letting the thread guide him to his destination. The two connected beyond space and time as, with countless seconds and undefinable distance, Typhon found him even within the dark.

“It’s one of my favorite shows… what do you mean you’ve never heard of it! Do you even know a TV? What! You don’t even know what that is. Hot damn, I have so many things to show you.” The voices continued to bubble around him and, each and everyone of them, made Typhon smile as he found the source of it all.

Floating there, motionless with a hand reached up, was the one he was searching for. As if waiting for him to find him.  

Taking hold of his hand, Typhon swam towards the surface.

“…have to let him go.” Voices, other people, were telling Typhon. Dictating his life for him, yet again. Just like before on Saber, his home planet. Telling him what he should do. How he should just get over it, over him. “Shit happens.” Were the last words the coyote ever said to Typhon before walking away, most likely to drown himself at the bottom of a bottle. “I’m sorry, son, for your lost.” Their mechanics heavy paw landed on is shoulder. “I know it’s difficult but…” No words that could be said could ever fill that empty pit that had formed after such a loss. “Doesn’t matter. All of you meat bags are doomed to pass sometime.” The ship’s AI wasn’t as comforting but, Typhon knew, was suffering almost as much as he was at the loss. “Doesn’t matter, you all fade away… in the end… leaving me behind.”

For when something is taken, an emptiness is left behind. A void. No matter what you try, no piece can ever fully fill what had been there. Each with their own coping mechanism to try and battle against the inevitability of it all. That deep well of loneliness blacker and darker than any pit.

Drinking, hobbies, crass comments or harsh remarks. Acting jaded or aloof. One thing or another, nothing mattered.

Not within them.

“Nothing matters.” Typhon recognized his own voice, even if it was so much older than he was now as he continued to swim towards the surface. “Nothing can fill this pit inside. Nothing…” Jewels rained down around him as he swam.

 Vehicles, ships, gadgets, guns, items, possessions that were taken, stolen from others fell around him in the dark sea. Objects that were far too bright to be real. Memories of events, of places, of things that tried to fill this empty pit inside. Drugs, alcohol, anything to dull the pain inside.  

“A pirate’s life for me!” They had laughed, a distant echo of the past. “We’ll just be space pirates.”

“That has to be the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” yet it was said with a heart-warming smile as the objects continued to rain down around Typhon as if a dump truck above them were dumping all these things, these echoes into the dark sea around them.

“Hey, I’ve already stolen something!” The Saberwolf grinned ear to ear, tail wagging after his brilliant stupid proclamation of becoming a space pirate.

“What’s that?” The cocky Terran rested back in the chair, waiting for his answer. They had an eyepatch on. One Typhon recognized from something, he, would eventually wear. Whatever he could to remember them by.

“You.”

Typhon felt a pain in his chest. It wasn’t from the lack of oxygen; it was something else. A deep well inside that was threatening to be ripped open as the memories continued to play around him. Endlessly beautiful, for Typhon knew, that one day, these thoughts that played like a station on a radio would come to an end.

And only silence would remain like the empty, dark sea around him.

If, or when, such a time came he hoped, and knew it wouldn’t, that he wouldn’t be going alone into the dark. For, in the end, we all die alone, and Typhon hated that the most.

“There’s something so special about it, don’t you think?” The waves crashed against a distant shore as the sun began to set. “The fact that, one day, that star in front of us? That sun will go out. It’ll go dark, just like everything, everyone else does.”

Typhon wasn’t swimming any longer. He was standing there, looking out as the dark waves crashed against a rocky shore. Standing there in nothing more than his birthday suit. Nude as the day he was born with dull gray full instead of his vibrant blue.

Just him, no Celestial light inside. Just… him.

“What is?” Typhon asked to the one that sat nearby. He couldn’t turn his head to look at them, yet knew they were and weren’t there.

“Finite. Finality. The End. The fact that because everything has to one day come to an end, it’s so damn… beautiful.” The Terran rested his chin on his arms on his tucked-up knees, watching the sun set. “No matter how scared that makes us. To what lengths we’ll go to prolong this life… I think living forever would be the worst pain in this or any world would be.”

“Why’s that?” Typhon asked as he stared at the dark sea before them.

“Because, even a single day without you in it would be my personal hell.” Isaac answered and, with a smile, tears ran down his face. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” He said as the sun began to set. “Seeing it… one final time?”

“The hardest thing for me,” Typhon felt the hot burning tears run down his face, dampening the fur on his cheeks. “Was sitting there by your bedside, knowing that The End comes all too soon…”

Isaac choked on his laugh at that, covering his mouth. “I’m so sorry… I couldn’t be more for you. I could never live up to anyone’s expectations. I wanted to be a space captain! Commander of my own ship! I was a fool. A dumb, stupid fool… thinking I could be special. Can’t even be the main character of my own damn story…”

“But you are, were.” Cyclone said.

“How?” Isaac tried to rub the black tears away from his face. They were thick and goopy as the sea lapped at his feet, threatening to pull him under its dark surface to never see the light of day again.

“You were special to me.” Typhoon grinned, tail wagging as the young Saberwolf smiled at the man that was and wasn’t lying there by it’s side. “It’s thanks to you, that I could experience all of this. All the new memories. The good… and the bad. Together.”

A hand touched his and that was all that was needed as the sun set and they rested, side by side, head against head, together as the all the stars in the night sky twinkled out. One by one. Each with a final wink, a goodbye, until the curtains fell and the credits rolled…

Typhon breached the surface with a loud gasp as he sucked in lung filling breaths of air, dragging Isaac along with him out of the dark pool.

From the shallow dark puddle, Typhon pulled himself and Isaac out. Crawling out of the thick liquid substance that dripped off his body. Dripping like tears from his fur. Moments that would be lost. Tears in the rain. Regrets that could fill an entire sea but could never be changed.

Coughing and sputtering, Isaac vomited what he’d inhaled. Black sludge spewing from his lips as he hacked and coughed it all out.

“T-Typhon?” Isaac looked at him with a bloodshot eye. “I-Is it really you?” He couldn’t even finish the thought before Typhon hugged him close, holding him as if afraid he’d slip away again. “W-what happened? I don’t… I don’t remember anything.” Isaac coughed as Typhon rubbed his back.

“It doesn’t matter,” Typhon said with darkened eyes, staring at nothing. “Nothing at all… you’re back with me. That’s all that matters.” Typhon didn’t want to admit or acknowledge anything he’d seen in that dark well that began to dry up behind them.

A single puddle that was deeper than any ocean, began to disappear. Shrinking smaller and smaller before only a single black drop remained. A drop that floated upwards in a bubble that popped and burst with a sickening wet sound.

A body hit the floor on all fours, coughing as they dripped with black ooze. Glaring up at Typhon, Cyclone snarled viciously.

“C-Cylone?” Isaac winced, holding the side of his head. “I, how, what? I don’t remember anything.” Isaac felt so heavy as Typhon supported him. “It feels like a lifetime, lifetimes have passed me by… I… it feels like something took a piece of my memory…”

Isaac was completely lost as to what was going on as his past, his future, his present all tried to realign in the same body as before. Flashes of things made him wince, hitting him like a truck as he clung to the only thing that he knew was real.

Typhon. His anchor.

“Dammit.” Cyclone cursed. “Dammit all! I was so close.” Cyclone stood on shaking legs. “I don’t care about this,” he gestured towards Raphael’s yacht of a ship around them. “I don’t care about them!” He pointed at the faceless crowd gathered around the Celestial crystal floating overhead. “None of that matters…”

Isaac glanced towards the crystallized Raphael, the floating white crystal, and towards the Tigeron addressing them. They all seemed frozen. Frozen in time as the three of them talked.

“How…” Then Isaac felt a weight in his pocket. Reaching down, he touched the hourglass that was there. “When did I get this thing?” He couldn’t begin to understand or grasp the depths of what he, his past and future self-had done in countless years throughout the timestream.

For that Isaac that was both did and didn’t exist. He would exist one day and did exist, yet now, this Isaac, just as this Typhon, didn’t know of all the things that they’d end up inevitably doing. For no mortal mind, or body, was ever meant to experience what it was to be timeless.

“Fuck, I have the worse hangover.” Isaac groaned against Typhon’s chest. “It’s like the time I tried to out drink Juke.”

“Rest here,” Typhon said as he gently placed the Terran down, turning to face Cyclone. “You.” Typhon addressed the clear threat before him. “I don’t know how, or why, or what any of this is!” Typhon shouted at the end. “But I warned you. I gave you all the chances you’ll ever get… and you still fucked up.”

“Heh, what are you going to do? You miserable excuse for a Saberwolf.” Cyclone spat to the side, wiping his chin off before forcing his mechanical legs to stand. They bit and tore into his thighs. He didn’t care. The pain was grounding, and it helped clear his head after the ordeal they’d all been through. “I’m going to kill you and-,” Cyclone pointed a finger at him.

Then there was a click in the back of Typhon’s head and a memory bubbled to the surface as the Saberwolf looked at this mechanical monstrosity of… himself.

“It’s not your fault.” Typhon said and Cyclone was taken aback, recoil as if the other Saberwolf had slapped him in the face. “I’d do the very same thing in your shoes. Or will do?” Typhon winced, feeling a sharp pain in the side of his head. His fur sparked, protecting him from the madness that threatened to consume them all. “It’s not your fault.”

“Don’t. Don’t you dare start with me! You think if you apologize enough and be all forgiving and loving it’ll change anything!” Cyclone howled, clenching a hand tightly. “Only cold, hard action will change anything. You can’t sit around and pray for things to get better. You have to do something! You can’t just wait. You have to act!”

“You did.” Typhon said. “And it’s not your fault.”

“Stop saying that!” Cyclone roared as he charged the other Saberwolf. With heavy mechanical steps, Cyclone closed the little distance between them.

Typhon easily dodged the first desperate punch Cyclone threw. It was like a child, his younger self, throwing the punch in a fit, a tantrum as the anger boiled over to the point he thought Cyclone might cry in sheer frustration. Typhon easily blocked the next blow that followed and caught Cyclone legs when he tried to drive the knee of it into Typhon’s side. Catching it, Typhon gave it a tug and threw Cyclone off balance. A well place shoved was all that was needed to knock the other Saberwolf to the ground.

Hitting it hard, Cyclone coughed black blood as he held his chest with a hand. Sprawled out on the floor, Typhon could only look at him with… pity.

“You…” Cyclone winced, gritting his teeth as Typhon looked down at him. “You think you can do any better than me? You think you’re better than me!”

“No.” Typhon simply said, looking down at him with a newfound sympathy for his blight. “I’d be just as miserable and pitiful in your situation.”

“Heh, heh…” Cyclone let out a wheezing, wet laugh as more blackened blood dripped from his fangs as he struggled to breathe. “You will be. One day, you will know exactly what I feel! You aren’t any different from me!” Cyclone, a copy, a doppelganger created by The Monolith knew very well all the things Typhon would suffer and go through.

He was created, birthed, and existed thanks to that pain inside. That regret.

“You’re right.” Typhon didn’t even bother to deny it. “But, that day isn’t today.” Typhon told Cyclone. “It’s not about the destination anyways. It’s about the journey. The little things throughout the day,” Typhon could recall having breakfast with Isaac. The two drinking from their own mugs. “It’s about every little moment, every second you can steal away with each other that matters. Not any of this!” Typhon motioned at the luxurious ship around them, “or that!” He pointed at the alien floating crystal. “The universe? The cosmos? Whatever. Screw that noise. It doesn’t matter. Only the time we can share together. Nothing less, nothing more.”

“It won’t change anything…” Cyclone almost sounded as if he were begging, asking for Typhon to refute his claim. To tell him some secret solution to the problem that he hadn’t come up with yet. He didn’t want to hear the words Typhon said.

“No. It won’t… not in the end… But at least I’ll have the memories of all the good and bad times to keep me warm at night with when… when it happens.” Typhon answered him in what might’ve sounded like the most defeatist of things.

But it was exactly what Cyclone needed to hear.

For there was no changing The End. You could delay it with medicines and time, but it would always be there. Lurking in every shadow, at the corner of your vision. Waiting. Waiting for the final second to tick by and for the bell to ring.

It wouldn’t chase you. It wouldn’t hunt you. The void sea would simply wait. For there was no changing the ending of something that was already written. No matter how hard you try. Death was the final beauty of life.

For the only way to truly be alive, is to one day die.

“Heh, no matter what I do or try… I’m such a failure.” Cyclone rose slowly, carefully. His mechanical parts screeched in protest as a tube on the side of his arm ruptured and broke and hot steam poured out of the whipping plastic. “I tried. I tried so damn hard and… nothing. I got… nothing for it.”

“Do you remember it, at least?” Typhon asked him, still blocking him from Isaac.

“Heh, no. Not at all. Everything,” Cyclone ran a hand over the side of his head as he turned to look at Isaac. “Everything I gave up… even my memories. At least, most of them.” Cyclone could recall so little these days as his fur dripped with that black substance.

Dripping, dripping, dripping… endlessly.

“Cyclone,” Isaac tried to stand up, needing to use the wall for support. The weight at his side increased as the hourglass pulled him down. Feeling as if it weighed five times heavier than a second ago. “I-,”

There was a sheen of light from behind them. A focused concentrated iris of energy that began to glow from the crystal floating overhead. Even silent and still, frozen in time, it reacted. It activated. Concentrated energy forming. Where everything else remained still, that single ray of light began to grow in intensity. Magnifying itself throughout the crystal structure before concentration on a single part.

The three of them turned to look at it.

“Wha-,” Isaac opened his mouth to ask, confused as the other two were as a single dot formed on his chest. A single white dot that glowed brighter by the passing milliseconds.

“Isaac!” Cyclone shouted, rushed forward.

It happened so fast. In a blink of an eye, a flip of a switch. It happened as fast as a light turning on was.

Shoving the Terran out of the way as, with that single flip of a light switch, a beam of brilliant white light shot forth from the crystal.

“Cyclone.” Isaac eyes widen, his mouth hung open as the mechanical Saberwolf smiled at him.

“I never forgot you.” Was all that could be said as he offered a dorky smile that didn’t matched Cyclone’s marred and scared face with mechanical bits and pieces holding him all together. “I-,” then it hit.

A single laser that pierced all in it’s path and burned a searing hole through the back of Cyclone’s body and out from his chest. Piercing through the void wolfs body, tearing open his mechanical parts and seared a hole into his fur and flesh alike.

A laser that was aimed at Isaac, that hit Cyclone.

“Cyclone!” Isaac shouted as time around them continued. The gray world began to regain its color as time continued to flow around them. The crowd of people began to murmur and talk, Bai’Tai above continued to shout at the crystal that glowed with ominous white light. “Holy shit, stay with me,” Isaac cradled Cyclone against his body as the Saberwolf collapsed. “No, no, no! Please,” Isaac reached down and recoiled at the heat.

There, on Cyclone’s chest, was a gaping hole that was singed along the edges. The burning continued to creep outwards from that gaping hole, disintegrating all it touched. Not a drop of blood fell from the wound as it continued to expand.

“I-Isaac…?” Cyclone wheezed against him. A soft breath that didn’t sound like his own. It sounded like someone far too young or far too old… weak and fragile, as Isaac held Cyclone in his arms.

“I’m here, holy fuck, I’m here…” Isaac held the Saberwolf closer. Supporting him, as Cyclone had always supported Isaac.

“I can’t see…” Cyclone let out a wet laugh that broke into a painful fit of coughs. “It was so dark… without you. I can’t see anything. It’s… so dark… so cold…” The searing flesh did nothing to remedy the ice that crept over Cyclone’s fingers and toes, making them grow… numb. “I-Isaac…?”

“I’m here.” Isaac told him as Typhon faced Dio Lux. The crystal looking down at them from above.

“I exist outside time’s influence, mere mortals.” Raphael the Motha continued to act as it’s mouthpiece as the crystal ignored the Tigeron shouting at it from behind. “Such tools should have never been given to those with such limited capabilities,” the Motha faced towards Cyclone. “Wretched creature of the void, return from the swamp you crawled out of and disappear from my sight!”

“Oh, fuck you!” Typhon flipped it off. “The dude was already on his last leg; you didn’t have to freaking shoot him in the back!” The Saberwolf sparked with energy. “You freaking…. Coward!”

“How little you know,” Dio Lux hummed with amusement as it turned away from them. “With that annoyance dealt with, this charade can come to an end, I suppose.” Raphael turned back towards Bai’Tai. “I have played with you long enough. You’ve already ruined my plans bringing such forbidden tech here. Ah, we should’ve dealt with your kind long ago. Let us end this.”

“End? End!” The white Tigeron shouted at him before motioning to his guard. “This is just the beginning!” The black Monolith thrummed as the two Tigeron guards activated it. Pressing the strange alien symbols on the side for the blackened glass structure to work.

Everything it reflected was absorbed into it’s dark surface. Chairs, holographic plants, the museums artwork and all the Celestials gathered there before it. Everything that looked into it’s mirror was reflected, copied and repeated.

From one side of it’s surface it would reflect something from the outside world, and from the other side it would spill out a duplicated copy of it. Sickly wet and sleek as if freshly birthed, the copy would ooze out of it’s rippling surface that moved as if it made of some alien liquid substance.

Copies of the other Celestials fell in a gathering pile as Bai’Tai laughed.

“This is just the beginning you arrogant bastard. Abandon my people, will you?” Bai’Tai clutched a hand over the side of his face, nails digging into his fur and flesh. “I-I’ll show you. Show them. Everyone! Father will have to notice me after I retrieve a progenitor! Even if it’s a crude copy,” the Tigeron laughed as his two guards turned the monolith on Dio Lux and Raphael. “I’ll copy you and see if you can deal with that!”

“Fuck…” Cyclone coughed as he watched everything play out, again, exactly as before. Even without sight, he knew what was happening. As it had so many times before. “That’s not good.” He gave a mock laugh.

“Don’t talk. W-we’ll get you some help.” Isaac looked towards Typhon who only gave him an apologetic shrug, unsure what to do.

“How about some water?” Typhon offered as Cyclone coughed.

“You idiot, need to… stop him.” Cyclone faced towards the others, even if he couldn’t see any longer he could hear the same back and forth that had happened before. Reliving the same life over and over again, the same moments and memories was in it’s own way a form of hell. “The Monolith creates copies…”

“Copies?” Isaac winced. “Ah, fuck. Right. Right, that damned thing from The Academy that Raphael and Bai’Tai found during their expedition into one of the Dark Zones.”

“That isn’t… Bai’Tai.” Cyclone tried to explained, but it hurt to talk. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to still be alive after all this time. “Doesn’t matter,” he spat to the side, every breath an exhausting chore as he wheezed. “Just stop them before it creates anymore.”

“Why?” Isaac needed to know that much.

“Paradox,” Cyclone looked at Isaac with blank, empty eyes that had lost their light a long time ago. “Two things can’t exist at the same time as the other. It’s a,” another cough, “paradox. The universe… will correct.” Cyclone didn’t have the strength and Isaac had to put the rest of the pieces together.

“Two identical things, people or otherwise, can’t exist at the same time as each other and the cosmic balance of the universe will make sure to keep that in check before everything breaks apart? Oh, that’s bad.” Isaac blinked, realizing the heavy implications.

“What?” Typhon asked cluelessly.

“There can’t be two copies of the same thing!” Isaac didn’t need to say more as, with another brilliant flash of light, a beam of condensed light swept through the crowd of people from the crystal above them. A burning laser that erased all it touch, leaving a massive scorch mark behind as it fought back against the endless horde pouring out of the Monolith.

Two opposing forces at natural odds and ends with each other. The copies didn’t need to be given orders or told what to do. Their very unnatural existence caused them, forced them, to fight against Dio Lux’s light.

The ship shook, tilting to the side as another beam of light tore through the mass of people and Isaac felt the gravity around them ease up as the structural integrity of the ship became compromised.

“That fucker,” Isaac cursed as the searing heat from the laser swept overhead, forcing Typhon to duck down before losing his head. “It’s going to destroy everything! Just because it can exist in the vacuum of space doesn’t mean the rest of us can, dammit all.”

“Never… cared…” Cyclone wheezed. “About… life.”

“Stop talking!” Isaac practically yelled at him. “Typhon,” he looked at the Saberwolf. “I need you to find and get Juke and Samson out from within the crowd.”

“The crowd?” Typhon blinked, turning around to look for the coyote and bear.

“They’re somewhere here, I’m sure of it!” Isaac touched the side of his head. “Sphinx?” He said, unsure why the AI was being quiet this entire time. The chip within the port on the side of his head was empty. “Dammit,” he could only curse. “The hell am I supposed to-,”

“I…saac?” Cyclone reached out blindly with a hand. Isaac quickly took it.

“I’m right here, Cyclone. I’m right here…” Isaac told him.

“T-there… you are…” Cyclone coughed, forcing a worn-down smile onto his tired, battered face. “I was… looking for… you…”

“I’m right here, Cyclone. I’m not going anywhere.” Isaac told him with tears prickling the corner of his eyes.

“Liar…” Cyclone chuckled as if it were a joke. As if life itself was a joke. “Liar… you told me… promised me… that you’d always be there.”

“I will. I am!” Isaac looked at Typhon who was watching them. “Go. He… he doesn’t have much time.” With a nod, Typhon ran towards the crowd, making sure to keep an eye on Isaac just in case something were to happen.

His attention was soon distracted by the Silken Cat, Elegan, that intercepted him. White crystals had sprouted from the feline’s left arm and right shoulder. They hummed with the same power that Typhon’s fur did as they faced each other.

“You… you aren’t even a Celestial.” Typhon warned the Silken cat. “That power will tear you apart!”

“I am… free…” Elegan said with crystallized white eyes, staring at him. “You will not stop… the master… plan. He will erase all unworthy and lift the rest of us… up.” Elegan opened his arms, about to go just as Typhon punched him in the face.

“I don’t have time for this!” Typhon shouted. His fist connected with something solid. The feline’s face didn’t crack underneath the blow. It felt like he had punched a diamond. “Fuck did he do to you?”

“Fixed… me.” Elegan could only say, diamond tipped claws springing out of one hand as he swiped at Typhon’s face. The Saberwolf jumped back, fur sparking with energy. “I am more than I ever was before…” The Silken cat let out a hollow laugh. “Think of all I can do as… this.” Crystals formed on the side of his face and over his ear.

The ear chipped and a piece of it fell to the ground, shattering like glass.

“You’re falling apart and expect to do, what?” Typhon cursed though. Even if he, like Raphael, were falling apart from being unable to handle the energy inside, they’re bodies still were as hard as diamond. “You only delay the inevitable…”

“Aren’t we all? Delaying… trying to delay… the inevitable?” Elegan laughed as claws sprung out of his other hand and he swiped at Typhon’s face again. Laughing the entire time with that hollow, bitter sound.

Above them, the fight continued to escalate as the endless swarm of bodies climbed and grappled over each other, forming a mass of wave of bodies to crash against the crystals surface. The touch of their darkened forms burned and hissed as they reacted to Dio Lux’s body.

Just as the crystal reacted to theirs.

“Enough of this!” Dio Lux, using Raphael, cried out as his perfect form was marred by the bodies splattering against it’s otherwise brilliant white surface.

Energy gathered in a concentrated point. Bouncing around, reflecting off it’s inner surface, Dio Lux channeled it into a single point as he had done against Cyclone. Aiming and focusing on the source of all of their struggles.

To one it might’ve seemed like an object of horror. To those who knew and worshipped it, The Monolith, was originally a beacon of hope for those in their last hours. A catastrophe struck and all the people bowed down and prayed to it. Begging it, pleading for it to somehow miraculously save them from a natural disaster.

The Monolith couldn’t. All it could do was reflect their horror stricken, tear-stained faces in their final moments as the lost people were wiped out. Only leaving behind a reflection, as The Monolith remembered them all.

As it forever would. Reflecting the world around it as a void artifact. Even the darkest of days or the brightest, it would remember. And reflect.

The white crystal’s laser hit the monolith just then and everything stopped. For a split second, everything stopped as a horrifying crack echoed within the space around them. For that split second, Isaac thought the glass ceiling of the room had broken. Instead, a single crack had formed on the darkened mirror side of the Monolith.

“No, no, no!” Bai’Tai shouted as he tried to force the crack shut with his four hands. “Please,” he begged it. “Please you have to do something!” The Tigeron demanded as the lost people had. His anger turning to desperate pleas. “Please, you can’t let that bastard survive after all he’s done.”

The Monolith didn’t move, for it was as still as a stagnant pond.

No light gathered.

Yet, within it’s surface, Bai’Tai could see a reflection forming. A single point, a single dot, and the Tigeron threw himself aside as The Monolith reflected what it had seen.

A dark laser fired from it’s surface. The same size, the same length, the same exact force that Dio Lux had fired… right back at the crystal.

The beam hit the side of Dio Lux, breaking off a chunk of his body that fell to the ground below. It hummed with energy, that chunk, but remained otherwise lifeless compared to it’s core.

Dio Lux was shaken. Damaged. Damaged for the first time in it’s endless existence. Something had… harmed it? It took a moment, a minute, to process that. Something that should’ve been infinite was experience it’s first concept of… death.

“Heh… This… this can’t be. This isn’t happening!” Dio Lux denied, he refused to believe he was harmed. “If you thought, even for a second, that such a weak piece of the void could harm me? You are truly more foolish than what little credit I gave you for.” Dio Lux hummed with amusement, turning it’s injured side away from the cracked monolith. “I have existed before your kind even walked on one of those mud balls you call a planet. Entire civilizations have rose and fallen in a blink of an eye before me! The very cosmos have formed around me! I am beyond time; I am endlessness itself. I am immortal. Nothing can harm me. I will outlast all of you specks that will disappear like dust in the vastness of space.”

“There that arrogant prick goes again,” Cyclone rested more of his weight against Isaac’s side as the Terran continued to hold him. “On and on again and again. An endless loop that just goes round and round. A broken record… A merry go… round…” Cyclone took a second. “I always wanted to go on one of those with you. We never had. Never would… never… never did… did we, starlight?”

“We can, we will. Just… hold on for me… please,” Isaac said, still trying to understand exactly what the flying fuck was going on right now. Typhon was fighting a crystallized Silken Cat, a race that shouldn’t even exist any longer. Then there was his old roommate Bai’Tai with a void artifact fighting… a floating crystal? “I just… if I can understand? Then maybe… maybe if I know! If I know… I can fix this.”

“You can’t…” Cyclone head tiled against his. “It’s… sweet… you try.” His nose twitched. “Don’t… don’t smell sad… starlight…”  

“Cyclone, please. Just… just tell me what to do.” Isaac begged him.

“Heh, heh… It’s funny… telling you… what to do… captain.” Cyclone felt so cold. “Hey… Isaac?”

“What?” Isaac turned away from the crystal, the black monolith, from Typhon searching for the rest of their crew while fighting an insane feline. Turned his full attention back to the man he barely remembered or knew, yet felt as if he had all his life.  

“Do you remember the jungles of Tigeron?” Cyclone suddenly asked. “How warm and humid it was? Or.. or the endless sea of that damned… Aquatic planet? The fish… heh, I suppose their mammals. Aren’t they? You’d always… always remind me of that. Sharks are fish but… but the shark people were mammals. Weird mermaids freaks,” Cyclone let out a wet laugh. “The spider people… birds… so many different sunsets... shared… So many places and sights… we saw… together.”

“I… do?” Isaac wanted to say yes to all of it.

“So many places for you to still see… without me… It’s funny, that I’m the one going… going first.” Cyclone hand went limp against Isaac’s, falling limp and lifeless to his side. “I’ll wait for you no matter… how long it takes… I’ll wait for you… where the stars meet. At our secret place… where no one can find us…”

“Cyclone.”

“Isaac… I can’t see,” Cyclone repeated himself as he slumped against Isaac’s side. “My starlight… are you still here?”

“I’m right here.”

“Isaac?”

“Yes, Cyclone?”

“Can you… can you hold my hand.” Cyclone asked.

“I…” Even though Isaac already was, he answered him anyways. “Sure, of course I can. I am… now,” Isaac said, gripping it tighter.

“Why is it so… cold… so dark? Is this what… you felt?” Cyclone let out a shiver. “Is this…”

“…No, Cyclone,” Isaac muffled a cry against his dull gray fur as the black sludge oozed out of it, revealing the gray Saberwolf underneath. “The sun is just setting, that’s all… the sun is finally setting in our secret place, on our island together… the sun is finally setting.”

“Oh. That’s why it’s so… cold… so… so dark… Isaac?”

“Yes, Cyclone?”

“Make sure… to wear a coat… if your cold…” Cyclone’s words began to fade.

Isaac snorted a laugh at that, at how strange that was. How silly and dumb and how… sweet it was to hear. “I will.” He promised him, kissing the Saberwolf between the ears. “I will…” He pressed his face against the spot.

“I… saac?” Cyclone words were no more than a whisper. “I’ll… be able to meet your… your mother… finally.” Isaac choked hearing that. “I hope… I make a good… first impression,” Cyclone let out a wheeze. “I hope… she… likes me.”

“It doesn’t matter. Because I do… I love you. I always had… I always have… and I always will.” Isaac promised him with another kiss between his ears.

“I know…” Cyclone smirked one last time as the burning hole in his chest finally began to go out. “I always… knew… always…. Would know. Always… had known. That… That you… You… are… m… y… starlight.” And Cyclone the Space Pirate, a doppelganger and a paradox in his own right, the second in command of The Stellar Drift and a Celestial Saberwolf from a doomed planet…

Light finally faded away into darkness as he passed on to the void sea calling him home.  

“Oh, fuck.” Isaac cried. It felt as if someone punched him directly in the heart. It hurt. It hurt so damn bad. It hurt to breathe as he held Cyclone’s still head. Rocking it back and forth in his arms as he sobbed uncontrollably, snot running down his nose. “Oh, fuck. It hurts. It hurts so fucking bad, Cyclone. Cyclone… please… say something… please. I’ll do anything. Even that one thing in the bedroom I’m not really into. We’ll go somewhere! Anywhere! Wherever you want… just say something.”

Isaac held the still form of his lover on his arms.

“If only I had more time!” Isaac begged and, then there was sand.

The wall behind him, the ground beneath him. The very air around him began to turn to sand as it trickle down like golden flakes all around him. The heat of the room increased, and Isaac squinted, blocking out the bright light above.

For a second, he thought it was Dio Lux. No, it was a star. A single star with two darkened orbs in the blue sky above them.

“Time, you say?” The jackal smirked at a very confused Isaac. No matter how many times they did this, it was always amusing to see them so utterly confused and lost when Zarvarsh came to them at their most desperate hour of need. “Now that, is something I can offer you.”

“Who…?” Isaac looked down to see Cyclone’s body beginning to fade away into grains of sand. Becoming part of the very desert around him. “No! No, no, no. Please, dammit all.” Isaac tried to hold onto him. Forced to watch, again, as his lover faded away from him. “Cyclone!”

“Fuck, shut up. I can hear you just fine.” A slimy black ooze rose from Isaac’s shoulder and formed itself into a Saberwolf face. Isaac, naturally, screamed. “Fuck, that took forever to reform after all that. Paradox bullshit, keeping me from existing in the time I already existed.” It cursed, shaking it’s head before glancing at Isaac. “Hey, kid, long time no see.”

“What the actual fuck!” Isaac tried to crawl backwards away from it. Seeing as how it was attached to his body, that wasn’t happening.

“Well, this is different.” Zarvarsh noted with peeked curiosity as he watched the exchange with amused delight at something, finally, new happening here in a place that only repeated. Just like this encounter had already happened. No matter how many times you watch a favorite show, it’ll eventually get boring and repetitive after the thousandths time.

“What is happening!” Isaac shouted out, looking at the jackal with too many mouths and then at the Saberwolf head next to his own and then around at the desert. “Where am I? Who are you! What are you?” Isaac pointed from one person, place, or thing to the next.

“Sheesh, relax. We’ve banged numerous times, even if you don’t recall.” Cyclone rolled his eyes, pulling further away from Isaac until, with a sickening splat, he fell against the ground. Standing up, the Saberwolf reformed into a familiar, if younger, shape and form than the one he’d seen on the ship.

“Cyclone? What, what, what!” Isaac jumped to his feet. Before Cyclone could begin to explain, he was embraced. “I thought you died!”

“Well, I did.” Cyclone shrugged as if it happens when Isaac gawked at him. “My previous self passed away. Paradox, remember? Two things can’t both exist at the same time. Once he was gone, I just sort of tagged in.” Isaac was utterly lost and Cyclone waved it away as he placed a large hand on Isaac’s head. “Good to be back.”

“I don’t understand but I’m glad you are here.” Isaac hugged Cyclone tightly and the wolf gave a grunt.

“Well, yeah, you wouldn’t be able to begin to comprehend or understand if you remembered every second of that place… together.” Cyclone’s ears folded back, blushing underneath his dark gray fur. He remembered and, sometimes, that was enough. “Even if this you isn’t the you that was previous here, or there, it’s still is, and always will be, you.”

Even if the one you love the most were to forget you, it doesn’t mean those feelings weren’t true. That they didn’t exist and, sometimes, those memories are all you need to keep you warm during the dark, cold nights alone.

For you would remember them. And, sometimes, that was enough.

“Yeah, but I don’t plan to let you go still.” Cyclone sneered down at Isaac as if he’d ask the question to those dark thoughts Cyclone always had. “I never planned to let go. No matter how long it took, to find you.”

“Right.” Isaac just nodded along, rubbing his face against Cyclone’s furry chest. He felt cool to the touch, the skin underneath slightly warm and the scent and smell of him was so familiar it made Isaac’s heart ache with a deep profound pain that only separated lovers could ever know. “Just… don’t go again.”

“I won’t. Even if you don’t remember, I will always be there. Watching over you.” Cyclone shrugged before rolling his muzzle around to look at Zarvarsh. The jackal was still sitting there watching them with drooling mouths. “Sup. Been a while, huh?”

“To me it has, hasn’t and is happening. I understand what you mean, though.” Zarvarsh gave a very human-like wave in greeting. “To you, it must’ve felt like eons. To me? It only feels like a blink.” He blinked his eyes. “There you are, again. Before, after, then and now. You are and aren’t here before me as you were and weren’t there before and will be. Every goodbye is my final time to remember all over again. Like repeating a TV show after it comes to an end…”

Zarvarsh almost seemed sad to say such a thing. Reliving, endlessly, in the past, that would become the present that could never reach the future.  

“Yeah, that, uh, sucks…” Cyclone felt Isaac try to pull back, he refused to let the Terran go. “So, what happens now.”

“I’m curious to know as well, my lovely hosts.” Zarvarsh said, still watching them with hungry eyes. “This has never happened before. Do you even begin to understand how… delectable that is for a being like me? Something knew for a change! Something that hasn’t ever happened before, even with all my previous hosts. The first time to taste this moment? Over and over again,” Zarvarsh licked his lips and all the mouths on his body mimicked the action before disappearing into it, away from view. “I’m just going to sit here and watch you cook.” He gleefully said.

“Uh, he sounds like a bad guy.” Isaac looked between Zarvarsh and Cyclone. The two clearly have a very deep, sordid history that Isaac wasn’t even beginning to understand. “Do we… fight him or?”

“You are always welcome to try again.” Zarvarsh continued to look at Cyclone. “Again and again and again. Not that it would change anything. It’s a fun exercise, though, to be have. Or to be had?” Zarvarsh motioned with his finger one way then the other. “Or has…? What is the past future tense for something?”

“Uh…” Isaac wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“Oh, right, sorry. You aren’t future Isaac from before. Don’t worry, you will be. Someday.” Zarvarsh shrugged and Isaac was getting that hangover of a headache again.

“I feel sick. I want to punch him.” Isaac groaned.

“Don’t bother, he’s immortal. Kind of?” Cyclone frowned, thinking that over. “He knows all possible futures, or ones he’s already lived through. He exists outside of time.”

“I… see?” Isaac frowned, not even bothering to try and fathom what all that meant. “Um, so, we’re not going to fight. Now what?” Isaac tried to pull back. Cyclone didn’t release him so much as his body itself stuck to Isaac’s front as if it were made of tar. “Uh…”

“Long story,” Cyclone turned his gaze back down to Isaac. With a bit of concentration, he moved his body like a living piece of fabric. He wrapped it around Isaac, reforming back into the very hoodie Isaac had worn when he’d gone back to see himself at The Academy. The dark gray hoodie had black markings on the front and down the top of the arms. A teeth like pattern lined the sides of it and a pair of eyes formed on the top to stare at Zarvarsh.

“Huh, cool trick.” Isaac said checking out the get up. “Can you turn into anything…?”

“Kinky stuff for later, Isaac.” Cyclone smirked at Isaac’s question. “I’ll happily do whatever you want or need me to do after we get out of here. Plug all your holes… once we escape.”

“How?” Isaac asked.

“It’s right there,” the jackal said, motioning towards the side where a blackened stone archway rose from the sand. “Back to the very nanosecond you came here from. I never said I’d stop you,” the jackal lifted his hands in a friendly peaceful gesture. “I was only going to offer him the same deal as I made everyone. It’s what I do. What I’m forced to do. Now? Now I’m curious,” he licked his lips. “Where this timeline will go and how it will… taste.” He bit his finger; hard enough blood should’ve been drawn.

Not a single drop fell however as if he were as hollow and empty as the void itself was.

“Subtle.” Isaac glanced up at Cyclone. “Do we just… go?”

“I can grow a pair of legs to move us if you need,” Cyclone mocked from above. It was strange. It sounded as if there were a pair of speakers within the hood of the hoodie Cyclone was speaking from. It was an unnerving sensation of his head being inside Cyclone’s mouth as the words vibrated around him.

“N-no, that’s all good.” Isaac said as he walked towards the archway. “Uh, I’ll be seeing you?” Isaac said, trying to be needlessly polite, to the jackal who gave a single wave.

“Without a doubt. One more time, as before, from the start of this… before, never again.” Zarvarsh said as Isaac stepped out of the archway and, in a rush of cool air, was right back where he’d slipped into the hourglass.

“Again!” A loud voice made the rafters above them shake as the crystal turned towards Isaac with what the Terran could only assume was it’s front. “You dare try to meddle with time, again, in my presence!”

“We didn’t do anything!” Isaac shouted back, quickly waving his hands to stop Dio Lux from firing. The energy was already gathering and a pin point of light formed on it’s crystallized surface.

Just before Dio Lux fired, Isaac felt his back get pulled by a strong force. Dragged back, through the air, Isaac was pulled away before the beam of light fired. It pierced the spot he was at, ripping through the ship, before sweeping up along the wall after Isaac.

The jacket Isaac wore crawled along the ship’s wall surface with sticky paws before stretching upwards to grab onto one of the metal flag poles that were showcasing various flags from around the universe. Snagging it, Cyclone easily swung between them as if his arms were ropes and towards the other side of the room. Isaac fell towards the floor, only for the sleeves of the jacket to catch him, breaking the fall. Rolling over, Isaac laid there, breathing heavily in shocked surprise.

“Uh…” Was all he managed to get out as Cyclone spoke.

“Don’t let your guard down again. You don’t have the band any longer to protect you,” Cyclone said. Isaac only then realized the silver bangle around his wrist was gone. As if it had never been there to begin with.

“The hell is happening!” Isaac touched the spot. He felt naked without the band.

“Not now,” Cyclone snarled as he was pulled again. Stretching out, Cyclone snagged another foothold to drag Isaac away from Dio Lux’s fury. The deadly light show continued to tear apart and disintegrate the priceless artwork Raphael had collected throughout his entire life.

In a single day, entire history of lost civilizations disappeared.

Like a natural disaster sweeping through a village or across a continent. Dio Lux was a natural disaster that destroyed all he touched in brilliant light.

“Cease to exist!” Dio Lux hummed as it glowed brighter and brighter.

“Don’t ignore me!” Bai’Tai shouted from the other side of the room. Motioning for one of his men to hand it over, the Tigeron aimed an energy cannon at the crystal. “Even if the Monolith doesn’t work, I can still channel it’s power to destroy you!” The Tigeron scientist shouted as one of his men connected the power cords into the monolith. “I’ve spent my entire life planning for this moment! I won’t let you or some nobodies ruin it for me. Once I kill you, I’ll replace all the Celestials with clones and use them to-,”

“Shut the fuck up!” Isaac shouted at him. “No one gives two shits about your dumbass plan, you piece of shit waste of space, loser!” Isaac swung through the air before landing on the upper rise that Bai’Tai stood. “I don’t care about you, or him, or anything.” Isaac twisted his hand into a fist and felt Cyclone’s own hand form over it. “But the second you hurt the ones I love,” and Isaac punched Bai’Tai square in the gut. Hard enough for the Tigeron to vomit his lunch onto the floor. “You’re dead.”

The two guards rushed him, and Cyclone easily hit them aside with a large tail that sprouted out of the back of the jacket as Isaac focused on Dio Lux.

The crystal spun around with Raphael in the front again, facing towards them before a brilliant blue neon light erupted from the ground like lightning and crashed into the bottom of it. Typhon hit the crystal so hard that it should’ve dented the thing if it weren’t made of the strongest substance known to the universe.

“Ow,” Typhon whimpered, holding his hand as he fell back down.

“Enough!” Dio Lux, using Raphael, shouted. The crystallized white Motha arm broke off and fell to the ground. “I am tired of this play. This isn’t how it was supposed to go! My collection, ruined!”

“By you!” Practically everyone in the room who could speak shouted at Dio Lux.

“Some collector you are Raph,” Isaac yelled at the Motha. If there was even a sliver of what was left of him in there, he wanted him to know that. “All you wanted to do was preserve history. Now look at it!” Isaac motioned around the scorched room. “You, alone, have single handedly destroyed priceless works of art that can never be restored! You have destroyed time itself. Memories of the past just… gone! Like that.”

The Motha didn’t even twitch in response and Isaac knew, or maybe he always had, that Raphael was gone. Crystallized and killed by the very artifact that he’d dug up from the ground. Like Icarus, he flew too close to the sun and his wings burned off.

“Damn it. Damn you, you stupid giant lightbulb!” Isaac wanted to punch Dio Lux in the face. Unfortunately, the crystal didn’t have a face. So, Isaac did the next best thing.

Kicking Bai’Tai to the side, Isaac took hold of the energy canon and pulled out the connecting tubes from it.

“No!” Bai’Tai shouted at him. “It’s my only chance to get revenge.”

“Don’t care,” Isaac said as he plugged the power cords into his arm. “Turn the damn thing on,” he said, glancing back at the Tigeron. “That beam cannon won’t do shit to him,” Isaac faced towards Dio Lux, lifting up his mechanical left arm. With a twist of the wrist, it retracted the fingers on his hand and a hole opened up on the palm of his hand. “I’ll channel all the Monolith’s damned energy into that fuckers face though!”

Bai’Tai scrambled to his feet as he ran over to the Monolith and began activating the thing.

“Our life’s work, huh, Isaac?” The Tigeron said as if they were still friends.

“Go fuck yourself, Bai’Tai.” Isaac didn’t look away from the target as his mechanical left eye focused on the giant floating crystal. It would be almost impossible to miss. Isaac still was scanning the thing over for any flaw in its design. “Fuck, it’s flawless.” Then he saw it.

The single chunk that was broken off by The Monolith’s retaliation shot. Somehow, the void artifact had hurt something that was perfect, flawless, like the finest of cut diamonds.

“Good thing the idiot has it’s attention,” Cyclone noted as the crystal hovered menacingly over Typhon.

“What is it trying to do…?” Isaac asked. He didn’t need an answer as the next second the giant floating crystal came crashing to the ground. Using it’s diamond-like structure and weight to crush everything underneath it like ants.

Typhon let out a startled yelp and jumped aside, holding onto a very dazed and confused Juke as the ‘yote was tossed out of the way from the falling crystal.

Dio Lux crushed the floor, he crushed a priceless statue, and a dozen of the Celestials gathered there. Crushing everything and everyone.

“Stop resisting and succumb to your fate.” Dio Lux hummed as he rose back up, the bottom of his crystal covered with blood and gore. “Be illuminated!” With a brilliant flash of white light, numerous individuals in the room began to glow.

The crystallized masks over their faces radiated with that white light as they turned on Isaac and Bai’Tai, while others faced towards Typhon.

“I offered your people, once, paradise.” Dio Lux spoke down to Bai’Tai and the other Tigeron with him. “Return to the fold, lost sheep, and I will forgive your transactions this day.” The words softened as he spoke, sounding like a pleasant chime.

It might’ve been persuasive if it weren’t for the fact that the bottom of the crystal was still dripping with a mixture of different colors of blood. Like a bloody rainbow, the gore dripped off it’s otherwise flawless form.

“Any time now, Bai’Tai!” Isaac yelled at the Tigeron.

“D-Don’t rush me!” Bai’Tai cursed as he connected one cord to another, then to his laptop. Adjusting the frequency and flow of it to match Isaac’s arm cannon. “This is a delicate process that needs time to perfect. Accounting for the humidity and wind speed in the room…”

“For fuck sake you striped bastard, just fire!” Cyclone yelled and the Tigeron jumped, slamming a finger down on the button.

Energy as black as the starless night sky itself began flowing down the tubes and into Isaac’s arm. He suddenly felt unbelievably cold. He could see his breath misting the air in front of him as he shivered, holding up his arm as Dio Lux turned back towards them.

Words, echoes of places and people rushed through Isaac as he felt, rather than saw, the reflection of The Monolith and those who had fallen to their knees, begging for salvation from it in their final moments.

For a split second, Isaac might’ve thought that The Monolith felt sympathy for them and their blight… just as it seemed to do now for them against Dio Lux. Always, seemingly, being there for the little man facing the giant. Reflecting, remembering, their valiant sacrifices.

“I am beyond your limited understanding,” Dio Lux’s chimes changed to a deeper ringing sound. “Beyond time itself! I have existed before your kind has even been conceived. There is nothing you mortals can do to harm me.”

“That’s the plan,” Isaac smirked as he pulled out the hourglass with his free hand. Snagging it, he jammed it into the opening in his palm, his fingers springing out to grab hold of it. Securing it in place. “If you are beyond limits? Then lets see what happens, shall we?” Isaac laughed like a mad scientist as he released the energy gathered in his arm and fired.

There wasn’t any sound. It was as if sound itself in that room was devoured as a wave of the darkest color known to exist fired from Isaac’s arm, tearing it apart in the process. That dark wave carried with it the hourglass that slammed against Dio Lux’s wounded side and forced the crystal back. The pressure increased against the seemingly fragile hourglass as it and the being beyond time were forced against the far wall. Crashing against it’s surface, pinning the crystal there.

Even the strongest of stones will eventually erode with the passage of time lapping at it’s surface, like waves against a rocky shore. Nothing is endless.

“Isaac, what exactly is the plan here?” Cyclone asked.

“The thing doesn’t exactly have arms,” Isaac grimaced as the pain in his arm flared to the point the safety switches flipped to stop him from feeling the pain. “I can’t just trick him into using that cursed artifact. It’s not like the Monolith that all you need to do is look into it. The hourglass needs to be purposefully turned… And he’s correct, we can’t hurt it. Dio Lux is beyond our capabilities… but what about something of the same equal if opposite power?”

“You plan to shove Zarvarsh down Dio Lux’s throat?” Cyclone let out a startled laugh. “That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard!”

“Two opposing forces that meet. Cosmic opposing forces of the universe. The unstoppable force verse the immovable object. The Time Devourer against The Timeless one!” Isaac let out an equally startled laugh at the madness of this idea. “Let’s see who wins! If it doesn’t destroy the universe itself first.”

The force was so great that one safety switch after another in his arm began to break under the straining pressure of the attack. Isaac’s arm was already at it’s limit and he was doing everything he could to keep it pointed in the right direction.

Cyclone, to his credit, braced the two of them by grabbing hold of the ground. Creating a mount for Isaac’s arm cannon to be supported by as it tore apart in pieces. Chunks flying off to the side or falling to the ground.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up!” Isaac shouted over the deafening silence. His voice sounded so far away. “I… I can’t…” Isaac faltered.

A pair of hands braced him from behind and he glanced back to see Typhon standing there. Samson and Juke lying unconscious nearby. With his hands on Isaac sides, Typhon released his energy that crackled and sparked. Surrounding the two in a protective bubble that Isaac’s band used to do. It was the same energy as what was contained within the band.

It had always been Typhon that protected Isaac, even before they met.

“I’m here.” Typhon mouthed the words Isaac couldn’t hear. “Just don’t stop whatever it is you plan to do! I’ll back you up. One hundred percent! Even if it leads to our doom, at least we’ll go down together!” Typhon forced out a laugh.

The pressure around them increased as the Monolith thrummed nearby. The dark structure was blacker than night, yet, here and now, before their very eyes they saw it draining away. A shell of itself wasn’t left behind. It was simply… disappearing.

Cries and please filled the air as the last remnants, the echoing memories, filled within the black obelisk like structure, The Monolith, began to fade away from existence.

Bai’Tai continued to drain it’s power, letting Isaac fire it from his arm as the void artifact began to crack and break apart into pieces. A broken mirror looking back at them. Even now, Isaac couldn’t see his reflection whole.

He was too damaged. A broken vessel in itself. If it were for Typhon, if it weren’t for all of Cyclone’s sacrifices… Isaac wouldn’t be there that day. It was only thanks to him, to this incredible being beyond the stars, that the Terran pilot could stand there with them. Facing off against unimaginable odds.

With even the slimmest of chances of winning, it was a miracle in itself that they had last this long.

“Right,” Isaac gave a single nod in confirmation and turned back towards the being beyond time.

Isaac didn’t pretend to begin to understand the meaning of any of this. A being that existed before the universe? Time that looped endlessly? They all seemed like impossible things to exist in the universe. Yet, here he was. With a Celestial Saberwolf behind him and one of the great nation leaders sons working on a forbidden artifact from one of the dark zones within space.

An artifact that had ruined Isaac life. It made him void touched and had caused nothing but pain and suffering since it appeared in their universe. An artifact that had taken everything from him. Now, here and now, Isaac was going to return the favor to the damnable thing.

And it listened, as if having always waited for this moment to come.

“Just… disappear… Already!” Isaac cried out as the Monolith faded away. Chipped pieces floating away like ash from a fire, disappearing to never be seen again as Isaac cranked up the power to the max and beyond the limits. “Just disappear from our reality! You don’t belong here!”

From family to friends, to his life before. Isaac couldn’t remember most of it after the Monolith activated at The Academy. It was a piece of himself that was stolen, taken, like his left arm. Never to be return. Even in it’s last moments, Isaac knew that it wouldn’t be able to give back what it had taken.

Like Cyclone, Isaac had sacrificed things he couldn’t even recall.

Yet, maybe that was why, The Monolith reflected him. The piece it had already stolen from Isaac, on the other side of that door, there to help him close it as he fired his arm cannon. Another Isaac, a reflection, his doppelganger or something else entirely… Was there to help him.

For despite being a fake, a copy, it still was, in the end, a copy of Isaac and if it truly was, then it would do the very same thing he would do in the end.

For what is a copy, if not a reflection of the self.

From the endless possibilities reflected within it’s mirrors, the Monolith crumbled away. Bits and pieces of it firing at Dio Lux as Isaac’s arm canon shattered, like broken glass, breaking apart at the shoulder with such force that, if Cyclone and Typhon weren’t bracing him, Isaac would’ve been thrown across the room.

Isaac slammed into Typhon’s chest and the Saberwolf was knocked off his feet, rolling over with Isaac safely in his arms as Cyclone shielded them from the brunt of the blow. The Terran cried out in pain, holding his bleeding shoulder.

“Fuck! Did it work? Did it work?” Isaac winced, trying to see as they all waited for the inevitable conclusion as the dark waves came to an end.

A crack formed.

A single crack that spread from one side to the other.

It wasn’t on Dio Lux’s perfect crystal body, however. It was on the hourglass itself. A shard of the Monolith was lodged in the side of the hourglass. A black shard that reflected the unity of Isaac and Typhon, yet twisted and deformed into – and Cyclone.

The last thing it could copy before it crumbled away.

In it’s final moments, like a camera taking a picture, it had captured their image. Distorting it, recreating it, mimicking and copying it to be recreated in it’s dark image.

The broken shard of glass vanished, leaving a hair’s width of an opening the container that held Zarvarsh within.  

“Futile, until the end.” Dio Lux hummed as he floated forward, knocking the hourglass aside. “All your efforts were in vain until the very end. Your struggles mean NOTHING before me! I am timeless. I am perfection. While all you will fade away. I will remain. Even when your memories fade, I will remember.” The air within the room began to get sucked towards the floating hourglass as if there was a rupture in the ship itself, into the endless dark void of space. A powerful suction that pulled everyone in the room closer to it as the crack formed in the hourglass and, from that sliver of an opening, infinity was released. “You think a lesser construct like The Monolith would be able to affect me? I am perfect. Only one such as I could ever hope to mar my conscious structure.”

The group ignored Dio Lux who wasn’t effected by such pressure, focusing instead to watch as the hourglass suction stopped and, after a moment, it fell, spinning, towards the floor. The hourglass spinning more times than Cyclone or Isaac had ever seen or used it for. They watched in shock horror as it spun and spun and spun…

For what happens when you spin it so many times? How far back would you go. Where would you even go? When, how, where would you end up?  

Then the hourglass it the floor. It shattered and they were gone.

There was no flash of light. No darkness that set in. In a single second they were there, and in the next… they were gone. Both the void artifact and the crystallized god. The progenitor, the one who came before, Dio Lux and the hourglass itself were simply gone.

The group waited with bated breath. Holding it as they all felt the seconds tick by. One by one they passed, and nothing happened. Nothing changed and the group looked at each other waiting for something to happen. For something to change.

Nothing did. They were there and that was that.

Isaac held his missing arm and felt as if it had been ripped from him all over again. From the start, where The Monolith had arrived at The Academy and to now, here, on Dio Lux’s ship. Two points connected, forcibly ripped off and left with a void where it should’ve been.

“Fuck,” Isaac cursed, wincing as he felt Cyclone crawl over his skin. A slithering texture similar to latex that moved down over his shoulder and formed where his arm had been. In seconds, his arm was back with a tinted black shade to it. The fingers moved at his command, yet he knew it wasn’t him but Cyclone responding on some level to his conscious desire. “Well… there’s that.”  

“Hah…” Bai’Tai suddenly laughed, making Isaac jump. Standing up on shaking legs, he laughed louder. “Hah! That’s what you get, you son of a bitch! You think you’re better than us? Than me! I am eternal, I am infinite! I am the timeless one, you,” that was about the time when Typhon wrapped an arm around the Tigeron’s neck from behind.

Holding Bai’Tai securely, the Saberwolf strangled the tiger alien without remorse. Lifting Bai’Tai off the ground and removing the threat he could’ve eventually become for them. Flexing his arm, tightening his grip, Typhon watched as the Tigeron eyes bulged from his head as he struggled against the increasing pressure and lack of oxygen.

Bai’Tai’s legs kicked, and his four arms flailed, trying to fight off Typhon’s absurd strength.

“Typhon!” Isaac got to his feet. Typhon didn’t ease up, just looked over at him.

“What? Did you want to do it?” Typhon asked.

“I, well… no.” Isaac winced, watching the horrifying sight as Typhon easily strangled the life out of Bai’Tai. “I already did it before.” Typhon quirked an eyebrow at that. Panting, exhausted and sore and tired, Isaac motioned at Bai’Tai. “This guy isn’t even the real one, I’m sure… I’m pretty sure, anyways, that they… they’re some kind of clone of each other at this point. White Tigeron’s are the only true royals. Some kind of inbreeding, cloning facility wouldn’t be that surprising. The one we saw on Tigeron, the one in the Terran Fleet Academy? This guy? All the same but… different. Explain why he can’t remember me at all. Even after I strangled him the first time.”

“Right,” Typhon watched as the Tigeron attempted to claw at his arm, trying to fight for breath. With a flash of electricity, Typhon fried the Tigeron and dropped him unceremoniously onto the ground after a sickening crack filled the air. “Well… that’s another one down. How many are there left?”

Isaac shrugged as he looked over at the two guards watching, horrified, at what Typhon had done.

“The young prince,” one of them said. Standing up, the one charged Typhon. The Saberwolf welcomed a release for all his bent-up aggression, unable to beat up Dio Lux he needed another outlet for his anger. Typhon jumped on the startled Tigeron guard in anticipation for a fight.

The second guard turned, planning to make a run for it and report what happened.

Lifting his left arm, Isaac pointed it at the guard.

“Shoot.” Isaac said the word and the sleeve of his jacket shot forward. The fabric turned to black sludge that, in turn, formed into a blade that pierced through the guards chest and out the front. They stood there for a moment, looking down at the black blade sticking out of them. Isaac retracted Cyclone and the guard toppled over, dead on the spot. “I wish everything was that easy.” He shook the blood off the sleeve.

Cyclone helped him by licking the blood away, making Isaac gag from the sight of his sleeve arm doing something so vile. It was disturbing how much he felt everything that Cyclone did. Even the taste of iron from the blood, making Isaac gag.

“Why did I infect myself again with you?” Isaac asked rhetorically, staring down at his eerily black tinted left arm. An arm he had lost, a piece missing and stolen. Replaced by the very one he had done it for. “This is so freaky…”

“Right!” Typhon said after snapping the other guards neck loudly. Dusting his hands off, he walked over to check on their crew members. “So… what happens now?”

Isaac let out a startled laugh. “How the hell would I know?” He asked and Typhon gave him a look. “Well, if you want my theory.” Typhon rolled his eyes, hoisting Juke over one shoulder and dragging Samson by one of his legs. Even Typhon struggled moving their mechanic. “The unstoppable force canceled out the immovable object.”

“What?” Typhon’s brain shorted out just hearing that.

“It’s just a theory,” Isaac rolled his eyes. “The two forces were so grand and cosmic, beyond our mortal understanding,” he teased the Saberwolf. “That when they collided with each other? That was that. Or Zarvarsh devoured him.”

“Who?” Typhon asked.

Isaac took a second on that. With a blink, he shook his head. “I’m… I’m not sure. Who that was.” He thought about it, mulling it over. “I thought, for sure, that he… who was he…?” Isaac couldn’t recall and it sent a shiver down his spine.

“Well, what about the ship? It’s still unpowered and I’d imagine we’d need it to get out of here.” Typhon changed the subject, seeing Isaac’s growing confusion.

“Oh, I already thought of a solution for that. We can use the crystal piece that fell off Dio Lux. He’s basically a giant energy source, right? Well, we’ll just plug that into the ship from where the core was stolen and, well, I’m sure Samson and Sphinx can make it work.” Isaac shrugged. “The ship itself ran on an artificial sun. Dio Lux was basically a star…. So, why not?”  

Typhon snorted as they went to retrieve the piece.

“Would it be fucked up to use them?” Typhon asked, pointing at the crystallized Celestials around them, the Silken Cat that had died on the spot after his heart crystallized, or the remains of the Motha. Each were horrifying to see.

While Raphael looked regal and beautiful, like a statue, carved out the crystal. The Silken Cat had a horrified look on his face, clutching at his chest as he yowled out one final time before his very blood crystallized and froze him on the spot. Frozen in time, forever, to be trapped there.

“Oh, Raphael…” Isaac said sadly, looking at his departed friend. “I wonder how long he’s been… gone?” Isaac hated the idea. The idea made him shiver, turning away. A flash, a memory, an image of blue shards jutting from his arms and body matched what had happened to the others within the room. “This is going to have a horrifying echoing effect on the universe.”

“What do you mean?” Typhon followed Isaac’s gaze towards the dead bodies of the Celestials.

“These weren’t just any rando off the street, Typhon. These were judges, politicians, people in high position within grand empires or nations. Some were diplomats and others were envoys for their people… Bai’Tai must’ve wanted to replace all of them with his cloned copies from The Monolith. Let Dio Lux have all these Celestials to play with, while he used their doppelgangers to, I don’t know, probably try and take over the universe or something.”

Isaac shook his head, feeling bad that they hadn’t been able to save any of them. From under Dio Lux’s influence, to the fight that had broken out. Those who had survived, like them, had fled the scene at the first chance they got.

If any of their doppelgangers had survived, they’d hunt down the original and kill them… Just as Cyclone had tried to do.

Before Isaac could address this thought further, the very ship around them shook violently and the two exchanged a look.

“I’ll carry them.” Cyclone said and Typhon’s ears perked up, looking around for the source of that voice.

“Who?” Typhon asked.

“No time!” Isaac told Typhon as he took Juke and Samson from him. “Grab the crystal!” He ordered Typhon as his jacket wrapped around Juke’s waste and around one of Samson’s ankles. Having the artificial left hand was helpful as it clung to Samson’s leg like a sticky web. “I’ll drag them along and you carry that thing.”

“Easier said than done!” Typhon shouted back as he haphazardly began to roll the crystal chunk towards the exit. The ground beneath them drifted away as gravity itself became lighter. “Oh, hey, this is much easier!” Typhon grinned as the weightless gravity allowed him to push the crystal instead of rolling it.

“The power for the ship seems to be failing,” Isaac wished Sphinx was here. He was sure the holographic lion would give them a countdown. “The ship must’ve been powered by Dio Lux himself.”

“That just means this chunk of crystal will power the ship!” Typhon grinned, wagging his tail as he doggie paddled through the air.

“Always one to look at the bright side of things.” Isaac laughed as his jacket helped propel him through the weightless gravity. The two hurried towards the shipping bay, trying to figure out if they could use the energy source they’d obtained or needed something else.

“Well, obviously, we need to leave the ship. I doubt this thing will stay floating for much longer. If it doesn’t implode first,” Isaac let out a nervous laugh.

“Funny.” Typhon said.

“I’m not joking,” Isaac sighed with a shake of his head. He missed having Sphinx here. He hoped the AI would be okay after losing the piece of Sphinx he had taken with him. Their ships AI was not going to be happy about that. “I told the bastard not to duplicate himself.”

“It’s for the best,” Cyclone said, and Typhon jumped at that.

“The fuck!” Typhon threatened Isaac’s new jacket as he took a mock kung fu stance.

“Relax. He’s a friend,” Isaac was not going to go into all that with Typhon not now, at least. “It’s a long story.”

“You’re going to tell me this time, right? Right, Isaac? Right!” Typhon asked and the Terran just kept floating down the hallway as the alarm bells began to go off overhead.

“Dio Lux really damaged the ship. We need to get going.” Isaac said, ignoring Typhon as he hurried up. “Come on, Typhon!”

“Wait for me you jackass!” Typhon shouted after him as the two, once again, escaped from a ship they had inadvertently helped bring to its end.

They never needed to wonder or think of Dio Lux or Zarvarsh ever again for they were beyond their time. For what was a person in the twenty first century compared to one in the thirty first century? They were in the same universe but disconnected by the vastness of time and space itself.

What of someone on a distant planet, in a different time? How could they ever be connected or in contact with each other. One would have to go through time and space itself to form that bond, to connect that thread that would bring two different beings from two different worlds and time together.

It would be impossible, some would surely say. To connect two points of space, two beings, together through time and space itself.

One could even say that those two people wouldn’t ever matter to each other. Never able to interact or influence the other. Such small blips within the vastness of space. In the empty ocean with so few stars and planets within it.

Specks of stardust.

To what lengths would they have to go to even see one another. What would they have to give and sacrifice? Who would they become after such a thing transpired?

Would it be worth it?

To go to such extremes?

Surely, there would never be one so desperate to go to such lengths when there were trillions of other stars in the sky above. Endless possibilities they could’ve chosen. Other people, other paths to take. To become someone else and, inadvertently in doing so, doom their chances to ever meet that star?

To single one out, to reach for it and to hold it in the palm of your hand. Knowing it was there, yet forever unable to touch it. It must’ve seemed like a daydream. A nightmare. Torture. To know they were there but knowing they would never be able to meet….?

“Hey.” The Terran laid there, underneath the night sky. The grass blew and he could smell the genetically engineered wheat his parents farm grew nearby. He liked to come here, to this very spot, to this very hill where he could lay down, hidden from view from the main road. He could just stare up at the sky above and let his mind wonder.

“Hey,” on a dusty red craggy planet that had seen more wars than entire races of people ever had, laid a young Saberwolf tucked away at his secret spot. A spot where it was difficult to reach, a single flat piece of ground to lay on next to a jagged cliffside. It blocked the harsh winds that blew while giving him view of the sky above. “You’re back again.”

“You don’t sound surprised.” The Terran chuckled as he placed an arm behind his head. Next to a spot, a piece, within the air itself that rippled and distorted like an old television screen. A window to another place, another time, that was beyond his own. “You weren’t waiting long, were you?”

“Nah,” there was a soft sound of thumping of a tail against the ground. “I just got here,” they lied, and it made the other man laugh. “I knew you’d come. Eventually. All I had to do was wait.”

“I wonder about that…” The other man thought aloud. “How is this possible? Where did this rift come from? These two points within space, connected, like this.”

The Saberwolf shrugged as he looked over, next to him. To the spot where a Terran laid on a grassy green hillside. Green grass the Saberwolf had never seen before on his desolate, barren planet.

“Does it matter?” The alien canine asked, and the human laughed.

“Of course it does!” They grinned, a smile that hurt their cheeks. He hadn’t ever remembered smiling this much since his mother’s passing. “Everything can, eventually, be explained. There is no such thing as magic. Just… science, physics, we don’t fully understand or comprehend yet.”

“So…” The Saberwolf turned to face them and they glanced over at him. “What you’re saying is, when we do understand how to do this? One of us has to do it.”

“Correct!” The Terran laughed. “Whichever one of us discovers how this is possible first? We need to make sure to do it.”

“Make sure to do it,” the Saberwolf repeated so he wouldn’t forget such an important detail. “What would happen if we chose to take a different course? To choose a different path… what if this is too hard? Too unimaginable?”

“Nah,” the Terran winked. “See, you know why I know this will happen? This phenomenon?” He asked and the Saberwolf just waited for his answer. “Because it’s happening right now!” The Terran laughed, turning to face him. “The only way this ever could’ve happened in the first place, is that, somehow, we, or someone else, had done it before. OR will do it.” He offered instead. “The fact of the matter is… if this is happening? It’s because it will happen. That we, one of us, will make sure to make it happen.”

“What if…”

“No buts,” The Terran cut him off, reaching out a hand that couldn’t ever touch. The Saberwolf mimicked the action, like a mirror, reflecting what the other man had done. Placing his hand next to his. “No matter what,” – said.

“No matter what,” Typhoon repeated.

“No matter how long it takes.” Isaac said.

“No matter how long it takes.” Typhon replied.

“I will find you.”

“I will find you.” The Saberwolf grinned with tears in his eyes, tail thumping loudly behind him as Cyclone made a promise that would surpass even the stars themselves. “No matter what.”

To break the laws of physics, to reach through time itself, to cross the vast universe…. “I will find you.”

That their very existence would have no effect on how the cosmic balance of the universe went on. No matter what choice they made, what course they took, they could never truly change anything. That two lights, no matter how bright, were only miniscule parts of the grand scheme of things. Yet, somehow, someway, that even if that was the case.

That if everything was meaningless when you looked at it from a cosmic scale.

It would be the most important, most pivotal, most canon event for them to take to insure their own happy.

“Until we meet again.”

“Beyond the stars…”

…

…..

…….

In the beginning, there was nothing. Only infinite darkness that spread throughout the emptiness. No light. No warmth. No stars in the night sky.

Even Dio Lux didn’t know how it happened, but one eon energy began to gather. To swirl together and from within the explosion burst out into several lights. The first stars, in the sky. Brilliant and illuminating, they were the first ones to exist. The Predecessors to life that would come within the next several megaannum when life would eventually begin.

But, before then, there was only lights. Massive, crystallized beings that swirled together in their own created gravity. Blue and red, white and gold. Numerous, countless colors that created a silent chorus of music and song.

Their energy radiated out into the cosmos as they continued their endless dance. Gravity, radiation, and solar energy began to spread. What was nothing began to miraculously create something. Life.

No words were shared. It was a time before language existed. They resonated with one another, calling out in their own ways. Songs that would become the first chimes that vibrated and echoed throughout their crystallized forms.

And Dio Lux was… happy.

His white light shined brightly amongst his brethren. Some may even say he shined the brightest. The brightest star.

He did not know how long they danced. How long they spun and created. How long they put the start to the process of the natural order of things. Their very being, their very existence radiated across the cosmos.

Eventually, all things must end.

One by one, his brethren began to sway and drift away from their union. It was unspoken. No words could be said, none were needed. They knew it was their time. All of them agreed, in their own way, that they must depart.

One by one, they left. Shooting off into the endless darkness. To spread their light, their warmth and effect the birth of new worlds, vast cosmos and to create what we know to be the universe today. On purpose, or not, their very presence, the radiation leaking out from within them, was enough to start this change.

All were in agreement, except for Dio Lux. Who wanted to exist forever, together.

He, too, would shoot off into the darkness. His, the most brilliant of lights, could do nothing to stop the others from leaving. Knowing he would never see them again? Dio Lux… for the first time, felt what Loneliness was…

….

So much darkness. So much emptiness. There was nothing. There is nothing. Dio Lux, in the emptiness of space, couldn’t see the lights of his brethren. He couldn’t feel their radiant song echoes throughout the cosmos. He knew they were out there, somewhere, within the endless dark.

Yet, he, here, was all alone now. There was nothing here but cold, darkness. In the emptiness, Dio Lux’s light, no matter how brilliant, began to fade and dim. Becoming dull and lifeless as he waited.

Be it gravity, be it the radiation emitting from the crystalized beings body, as years turned to centuries that past into millenniums planets began to form. Circling, caught up in the massive gravity the being of light, a star, created. Forming seemingly from nothing, life began to sprout and bloom.

Time was meaningless.

A day felt like a second, a year a blink of an eye. Time meant nothing for beings that did not die naturally. Dio Lux could only wait and watch as he became the center of his very own galaxy. A brilliant star that would help birth life of desolate worlds.

It was something to do in the endless nothing. To keep his thoughts occupied. Swirling and controlling the gravity around him, Dio Lux brought forth planetesimals, asteroids and comets alike. From within the dark, he created beauty. With his light, he could change things.

Was this what their purpose was? He thought. Was this what my brethren are doing elsewhere? He wondered. Are am I that amazing? Am I truly the brightest star in the night sky?

…

On one of the planets circling Dio Lux, he found life. The first remnants of it beginning to form. With his brilliant light and warmth, the creatures there were able to grow and evolve as the decades ticked by like the small hand of a clock.

He watched, he wondered, and he waited. Little small terrariums to him. Planet, bite sized, pieces for him to observe from above. Their god. He was a god. He was THEIR god.

Every day, the planet would spin and half of it would be shrouded in darkness. Unable to see his light, his glory.

“What is the point of being the most brilliant being if you cannot be observed?” Dio Lux wanted to be seen. He needed to be seen.

For if he was seen, if he was known, then maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be alone anymore. He would exist in the eyes of others.

Breaking a piece of himself off, Dio Lux let it drift towards the planet. A massive, crystalized piece that was launched towards the planet, caught in its gravitational pull and eventually would fall to the ground as a falling star.

Crashing into the planet’s surface, the chunk of Dio Lux was buried deep within the ground. Further than he intended, but such things would be alright. The winds blew, the ground shifted, the tectonic plates of the planet quaked and with it, eventually, throughout the countless years Dio Lux emerged from the ground.

His light was so brilliant, it wasn’t long before the natives found him. Primitive, bipedal creatures that dropped to their knees and bowed before him, worshipping his light.

For “man’s” very first friend was fire, that warded off the dark, and Dio Lux was the most comforting of lights for these strange alien beings.

…

As the years went by, Dio Lux observed these strange alien lifeforms. How primitive they were at first but, over time, they slowly grew and evolved. They learned and passed their knowledge onto the next generation so that they might have a better chance of surviving. To spread their genes. The strong survive and the weak perished.

Such was life.

“Cold, cruel and fascinating.” Dio Lux would’ve smiled if he had a mouth to do so. “Life is so short, yet so brilliant in its own way. To be finite? It means to experience every day as if it were your last. To appreciate the smaller things.”

Dio Lux came to love these strange creatures. He could not understand their language, but he felt the vibrations of their voices as they worshipped the chunk of him. They brought it to their village, mounting it in the middle of it. Letting his light and warmth filled their village. To protect it from the cold and dark of night.

He was their comfort.

He was their friend.

He was their protector.

Dio Lux became like a father to the natives, and, for the first time, Dio Lux knew what it meant to be, to mean to be not alone any longer.

…

….

…….

Fire.

Destruction.

Where had it all gone wrong?

Another tribe had invaded. A barbaric savage tribe that slaughtered his people. Coveting his light for themselves. Such brilliance that had brought them such comfort, were now the basis for their destruction. The reason these savages had come here and killed his beloved children.

His people came to him on fallen knee. Begging and pleading, praying to him as a God.

“Some god.” Dio Lux couldn’t do anything. He had, long ago, agreed to not intervene in such matters. “Life is beautiful, because it is finite. If I were to step in each and every time something happen, then they would never change, never grow…”

But what of Death?

Death stops the potential of others to grow and evolve. It is a different kind of change. A change that made Dio Lux feel nothing but loneliness.

“Wake up.”

The bodies laid bloodied around his crystal. Reaching out for him, praying for him, begging him, pleading him for aide.

“Wake up!” He wanted to cry out, but he had no voice to do so.

Even in their last moments, they reached out for him. Hoping for his aide.

“Please,” their silence was deafening. “Please, don’t leave me again.” Dio Lux tried to spread his warmth but their cold, lifeless bodies could not take it. His comfort, his joy, his love? Washed over their still bodies to no avail. “I don’t want to be alone again.”

Only silence answered him.

They left him there to rot. A hunk of rock and nothing more. Time passed by and the ground eroded from the harsh rains and a dense jungle grew around him. Tangled vines wrapped around his body as the thick canopy covered the light of the star above.

Strange.

That star, up there, was him wasn’t it? Why then was Dio Lux not able to reconnect with it? He broke only a single chunk of himself off to explore. It was a small, miniscule piece. Yet, this single piece had grown so much more in the short amount of time than the whole of him had.

He’d been effected by these creatures. Experiencing their joy, their sorrow, their life with them. Dio Lux wasn’t the same as he’d been before. If he had remained up there, in the sky, he’d have never known the wonder of life.

Or finite and fleeting it was.

To experience such pain was heartbreaking. His crystal threatening to crack and break apart from the loss. The pain. He hated it. Hated this feeling. All he wanted to do was bring warmth and joy to others, to share his love with them.

Reflect them in his surface.

So, he wouldn’t be alone as the centuries ticked by. Isolated and alone. Each slower than the last. Dio Lux thought he might go mad in the loneliness…

A void. That was what this was. A void of life, of light, of joy…

For what was immortality if you had to live alone through it. The stars themselves would one day blink out and the suns would die and the worlds were grow dark and cold. Then, there would only be silence. An emptiness left.

Void. Void. Void….

Then there was a cut, and a vine fell limp at his side. A machete swung through the air, cutting another one. One vine after another was cut away, the moss was pulled off and the sediment that had formed on his crystal was chiseled away.

“I found something!” The vibration rippled like waves against Dio Lux’s surface as a Motha called back to the expedition party. “To think anything was left here, all alone, like this.”

Alone…

“The last remnants of this lost civilization. A piece of their history. A memory of their people.” Raphael wiped the sweat from his brow. “To think it could’ve been lost to time.” The Motha wanted to preserve history. To keep time from eroding away. To try and stop time from erasing its existence, to be forgotten forever. Just as Dio Lux might’ve become. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you be forgotten. Everyone will be able to see you.”

“Everyone…?”

The crystal glowed and the Motha was enraptured by its light. A moth drawn to a flame, even knowing he shouldn’t touch it’s surface. Reaching out a hand, Raphael couldn’t resist its mesmerizing light.

“You’ll be put into my museum. Shown to all. Everyone can see how beautiful you are.” The Motha spoke automatically, forced to speak his thoughts aloud. To hide no truths before one that had been worshipped as a god.

“Everyone…” Dio Lux hummed at that.

“Let me just get you out of here.” Raphael was about to pull back.

“I don’t want to be alone, ever again.”

Raphael could feel the warmth radiating from the gemstone. A massive crystal that jutted from the ground. Hidden from view by the thick jungle it had been lost within.

Light glowed from within. The brightest of lights began to glow, before darkening. “Never again.” Dimming, duller and duller until, with the blackest of surfaces devoured all light around it. “Never. Again.” The blackened crystal hummed again, a song that only Raphael could hear as it took him. “All will see me. Be reflected in me. Become one with me. TO never be alone again.”

The purest of lights became tainted with it’s darkened thoughts consuming it from within. A deep empty pit that grew outwards, turning the white crystal to that of the darkest of sources. A substance that devoured all light, all reflection, that looked into it.

The Monolith reflected Raphael’s face within it’s surface as the Motha stared at it.

“What the-,” Raphael couldn’t even finish before it copied him, took him, pulling him inside it’s body and replacing the Motha with a doppelganger that was and wasn’t Raphael.  

In a sickening black light, The Monolith enshrouded the Motha in his reflective light. A light that reflected the star, the sun, floating high above. Mocking him. Looking down on him. Not being there where others were. Forgetting them all...

Out of desperation, out of loneliness, The Darkened Mirror Monolith grabbed at the first person who reached out a helpful hand.

And in doing so, consumed everything that Raphael once was. For mortals are weak creatures and the dark crystals radiation was too much for them to take. The Monolith filled Raphael’s body with its dark light. Possessing him, consuming him, encouraging, forcing the Motha to bring back the tainted void artifact.

To share it with others. TO expose them to it’s dark light. Wanting, needing, to be seen. For if it were ever to be forgotten, like the main body sun above had, then it would simply cease to exist. To spread across the universe like an infection.

His warmth. His love and, with it, his need to be seen. To be seen, and reflected, in the eyes of everyone who looked upon him.

“Show them.”

“Show them,” Raphael repeated the words.

“Show them my light.” The Monolith could finally be heard, using this creatures body. “Never again, will I be left in the dark. Never again will I be alone. All will know me. All will love me, and I will bring them…”

“Joy.” Raphael smiled as his eyes grew moist, tears threatening to fall as his consciousness was consumed and his free will stolen away from him.

For the first time…

….

Dio suffered for so long. All alone. The brightest star in the night sky, yet all alone. What is the point of being the brightest if no one sees you? Light years away from the closest planet, he had remained alone since the dawn of the universe.

Consumed by his own loneliness, he broke himself apart becoming more than one. Possibly how the Crystallized being reproduced to begin with. Breaking apart to create another, to learn and grow from the finite that was mortality.

Only to experience that loneliness, time and time again.

Other groups would come. They would disappear all too quickly. Vanishing. Only their memories, reflected in his now dark surface, would ever be remembered or recalled. To be forgotten.

Like his name one day would be.

Like his voice one day would be.

TO be all alone and know, in the end, he was the cause of it. A dark reflection of himself that doomed all that looked into his reflection.

His beloved children killed by a savage tiger race of people that would use and abuse him, before abandoning him? No, no… that was and wasn’t right. Did he abandon them? Were those four armed feline creatures the original tribe to worship him? The ones he couldn’t save? It didn’t really matter after the act was done… lost, forgotten, save for one who would tell others that would come and find them again.

One that was an echo of more. A piece of time frozen in place. Spreading through the universe themselves, like an infection.

“The Monolith, Dio Lux, Raphael and Bai’Tai? All of them were and weren’t themselves. How, amusing.” Zarvarsh licked his lips, tasting the endless history that no one else would ever know. Devouring every piece and bit of Dio Lux over countless eons fighting against him. His struggles were endless, only adding to the flavor of his tale. Tasting all his pain, experiencing it from every bite he took, piece by piece he turned the brightest star in the blue sky of his cell into his nourishment.

Only then, finally sated, did Zarvarsh breach into our reality, tearing a rift that he could slip freely through after his cell, the hourglass, had been broken from.

“Eternity. It has been eternity since I thought to cross over…” Zarvarsh countless mouths all smiled gleefully, hungrily, at what they could taste next…

Only to discover that he had been gone for so long, enjoying his meal, that there was nothing left. For in timelessness there was no way to track the hours, the days, the years and eons that passed him by. The universe itself had come to an end. Like everything else, it was doomed to one day cease to exist and there, Zarvarsh, floated in the nothingness.

“This… this can’t be,” he wanted to laugh, but there was no space for the sound to be heard in.

Only a void. A deep empty void of deafening, maddening silence. With nothing, no one to keep him company now.

Floating in the void sea that had eroded everything else away.

Yet, Zarvarsh, had cursed himself with knowledge that no being outside of existence should understand. The concept of time. Of what it meant to be bored. To be lonely. To know love and loss. It was a doomed from the start.

For no void being could ever be real, to exist, and thus was doomed from the very start to go mad.

“Time.” Finally knowing what it was to experience time, the jackal began to go mad. “Finally free and this is my thanks for it!” Zarvarsh cried out with too many mouths as his form twisted and lashed out.

There was nothing there to hear him.

No one there to see him.

No more time to devour, for the concept of time had ended with the universe. There was nothing left but silence…

Echoing, dark silence… it was painful. It thrummed in his ears like a sickened heart beating. He knew it was only his sanity deteriorating with the countless years ticking by. There were no sun rises here. No sun sets. No way to keep track of time. Worlds didn’t spin around suns.

There. Was. No. Time…

“Oh.”

It stretched endlessly. There was no discernable way to keep track of time. Did the concept of a year pass? Did a decade or a century? How would you know? How could you measure them? Every second could be years. Every year could be seconds. Echoing, ticking, like a grandfather clock you couldn’t see…

 Zarvarsh wouldn’t be able to tell. Everything was the same. Unchanging and dark. Forever, and ever, and… ever…

“Oh!” He said again, maybe, a millennia later. “Of course!” Another decade passed. “I’ll just devour time!” Zarvarsh thought as mouths appeared on his body. It would take another thousand years before he started. “I’ll just devour time itself and turn it back…” Zarvarsh only had himself to devour and thus his endless hunger turned their fangs on the one last thing in existence.

Time.

The Time Devourer consumed what was left, the only thing left here in this empty void, itself. And, in doing so, erased the last thing in existence.

The…

….

End….  

…

…..

……

“Full output to the thrusters! I want to get out of here before we’re trapped.” Isaac ordered as he typed away on the console within The Stellar Drift inside Dio Lux’s ship.

“I can’t believe you bastards left me.” Sphinx shouted from the side, angrily pouting in his kitty holographic form.

“Shit happens,” Cyclone sneered at him, knowing exactly what happened to that piece of Sphinx. Cyclone had always wanted to destroy Sphinx and, in a way, this time he had a chance to do so. And he had taken it.

Making sure the AI wouldn’t ever risk replicating itself again.

“That’s why everyone tells you not to duplicate.” Samson said as he came up from the engine room. The Ursa Major looked as exhausted as Juke did. “Captain, the crystal is working perfect. It’s, basically, another sun. A giant battery! I just slipped it into the compress space and the ship itself did the rest of the work.” The space bear nodded towards Sphinx who beamed happily.

“Great job Sphinx. You are an irreplaceable part of our crew.” Isaac said, without even looking at him. He was making sure everything was optimal for the jump.

“I’m telling you! Can’t do anything without me,” the lion rubbed a finger under his nose as he abashedly smiled at the praise.

“Ready when you are, Captain.” Typhon said sitting nearby. Waiting for his command.

“Right-,”

“I’ll be waiting for you.” A memory, a voice, an echo made Isaac freeze. A brush of lips against his ear, a hot breath against the nape of his neck. A whispered promise that Isaac only now seemed to remember.

“Hey,” Isaac felt a tear run down from his empty left eye.

“Hey,” they answered.

“I never got your name.” He finally asked. “It’s just, after all this time… I was afraid. If I knew your name, what if… the man I met in the future? Wasn’t you.”

“Don’t worry,” they grinned back, flashing a pair of saber fangs. “It’s like what you said! It’s already happen, so no matter what, as long as we take the exact same path as we did before?”

“Then we’ll meet.”

“We’ll meet.”

“Beyond.”

“Beyond the Stars…”

Then Isaac looked at him.

The bright blue Saberwolf had grown so much in these past several years together. His dark blue fur was lightening in color, and he was really coming into himself. The older he became, the more Isaac had to accept the truth he hadn’t wanted to admit. Typhon should’ve been the captain of this ship. He should’ve been the hero of this story, the main character.

He was so much more than Isaac would ever be. Ever become and yet, somehow, Typhon had chosen him of all people. Out of the trillion of stars…

“None ever shined as bright as you did.”

Isaac was truly glad to have him on board this ship with him.

“Go.” And The Stellar Drift, with its new power cell, took off. In a way, a piece of Dio Lux was with them.

The very thing, the very being, that had inadvertently started all of this. The first piece of a puzzle that would, one day, eventually show the picture of their lives.

The reason why Isaac had swallowed the piece of Cyclone, infecting himself with the void. To be connected to a man, a being, across time and space. Forever bound in ways that would break reality itself.

Was all thanks to the alien crystal within the ship’s power core that had reflected before him.

“You will hate me,” Isaac had been frozen back then. Looking into that dark mirror that Raphael had revealed to everyone within The Academy. “You will despise me.” It had said, yet Isaac only saw his reflection saying the words. “I am worthless. Insignificant and inconsequential.” He had thought it was himself saying those words.

Isaac’s left hand touched The Darkened Mirror’s surface. Stuck there, glued there, as it slowly sank inside. A reflection being absorbed, duplicated and repeated.

“But it’ll all be worth it in the end.” The reflection had smiled then at him. He’d been so scared, Isaac hadn’t realized that it wasn’t amused at his fear, his suffering, it was saddened to know all the things he would end up going through. “To see him again.”

“To see him again…”

The Stellar Drift, a ship from the future itself, easily took off. Maneuvering through the crashing ship that was crumbling around them like an old, ruined structure. A piece of a lost civilization itself. A floating relic in space that had a new coat of paint to fool others into coming inside. An ancient piece of history, not buried in the sands, or lost in the jungle… but left to rot in space itself.

The diamond shaped ship easily managed to avoid any obstacle that came up, firing through any that it couldn’t.

Sometimes, Isaac would think that they ship didn’t need them. They had Sphinx to pilot it after all. An extremely advanced AI that could easily do numerous calculations even as they flew. Samson was the mechanic. Juke was… well, he was there as the security officer. There were times when Isaac knew he wasn’t needed, even if he still liked to pilot the ship and feel like he was in control of his own life.

“Hey.”

The cosmos weren’t infinite, but to a man like Isaac, a mortal being, they could’ve been. He would’ve never known. Being so small in the grand scheme of things. He could never cross the universe from one side to the next.  

“No matter the cost.”

“Yeah, Isaac?” Typhon asked as the ship breached into the open space and took off for their next destination.

It didn’t really matter where they went. Where the ship took them. As long as they were together.

“So, uh, hey…” Isaac wasn’t sure how to have this conversation. He felt Cyclone shift uncomfortably around him, he held onto the jacket and felt it form a hand in his. “One day…” Isaac didn’t want to continue.

Didn’t want to listen to that darkened mirror that had promised him so many lies that Isaac had willingly touched it, dooming The Academy in the process. All his sins, all his lies, all his failures… he was forced to come to accept.

For if even a single one of those things were changed, then Isaac wouldn’t be sitting there now… with Typhon by his side.

“One day…” Isaac tried again.

“Yeah, one day?” Typhon’s ears perked up as the rest of the crew took a much-needed breather. Isaac just looked at him, as if seeing Typhon for the first time.

He looked so much older than the Saberwolf he had once known. Funny how only three galactic years later, Typhon could become such a man.

The rest of the crew were trying to get their heads back on straight after being controlled by Dio Lux.

“What did they promise you?” Samson asked. Juke just mumbled something about free booze. “Heh… same,” Samson lied without ever telling anyone there on the ship his dark truth as he lumbered his way back down into the engineering bay to check on their new power source.

“I’m going to take a nap. Like a fifty-hour nap,” Juke waved as he headed back towards his quarters. Leaving only Typhon and Isaac in the main room.

“So, uh, one day Typhon. Typhon… My sweet Typhon,” Isaac struggled with the words as he forced a smile onto his face. It hurt his cheeks to smile like that. It made his eye sting with tears. It hurt to breathe and Isaac tried to suppress the panic attack threatening to take him.

Typhon’s head tilted to the side, blinking twice before staring at him.

“I’m all ears.” He goofily said, wiggling his ears and making this so much harder to say than it needed to be. A part of Isaac didn’t want to say the words. A part of Isaac hoped that if he didn’t… then Typhon would never have to go through such pain.

Isaac knew he had to. No matter how hard or painful it was. He had to.

“Typhon… One day I’ll be gone before you, you know that right…?” Typhon flinched at his words, ears folding back down as if Isaac had physically slapped him in the face. “You know that, right? As a Terran? I won’t live as long as you do… one day, I’ll be gone.”

“We… we can figure something out,” Typhon reached out to touch his hand. Isaac was glad he did. It was comforting, like an anchor, preventing him from being swept out into a dark ocean with no light source to guide him back.

Not even stars.

Isaac always had wondered, since that day he touched The Monolith, if the Isaac that looked back at him with a cracked reflection… was him? Or someone else.

“The universe is vast! I’m sure there is something, anything, we can do to keep you… keep you.” Typhon whined softly.

“I know, Typhon. I know… and I plan to do so! To do whatever I can to, uh, prolong this. Us. You and me.” Isaac looked down at that hand and placed his other on top of it. It wasn’t his. It was and was Typhon’s. Cyclone had become Isaac’s arm, remaining otherwise quiet. Isaac still was glad he was there, even a part of him, with him. Despite… despite all it took from him. “You are so… incredible, and amazing, Typhon. So, so wonderful and bright and just so…. Yeah.” Isaac felt warm in the face as he knew Typhon was holding onto every one of his words as his tail wagged.

There were days when Isaac woke up, staring at a ceiling. Listening to the sound of the clock next to their bed ticking. Ticking. Ticking.

Seconds ticking into hours that would pass by until Typhon would wake up and Isaac would pretend to do the same. They would do their normal morning routine together. Shower and breakfast after. Isaac would brush his teeth, looking into that cracked mirror.

His cracked reflection.

And he’d wondered.

“I love you, Typhon.” Isaac said the words to keep himself from drifting away.

“I love you too, Isaac.”

Isaac would wonder if he were real. If the shattered reflection looking back at him was Isaac Mayhew, or was it the doppelganger that had come from The Monolith?

But, after meeting Cyclone, he knew that even if he were… and weren’t himself, that this feelings, even if they were a mocked reflection of the original, were still, in their own way, real.

“No matter what happens,” Isaac promised Typhon. “I will never stop loving you.”

“Uh, right…?” Typhon looked confused, uncertain what this was all about but never doubtful. Never doubting Isaac love for him.

“One day, not today, and not any time soon mind you! I’ll be… I’ll be gone.” Isaac looked up at him, tears in his eyes. “If…” That broken reflection looking back at him. “It’ll hurt… I know.” It was so hard to say this, even if he knew he had to do so. Reaching out to touch that darkened mirror. “If the day ever comes that you can’t go on? Can’t… can’t live without me?”

Just as The Monolith had offered Isaac, Isaac was now offering Typhon. A dark truth that only the void could fulfill.

“Isaac,” it had whispered when all others were dead and gone. When the world had turned black and gone dark. “Look.” Isaac didn’t want to. It was too painful. “It’s all there. Before you. Look into my mirror and know,” Isaac left eye cracked open, daring to risk a peak. Out of morbid curiosity or forced persuasion, he had never been sure. His left eye couldn’t close as he saw his reflection, reaching out to touch it with his left hand. “Know that he is there. Waiting for you.”

Isaac vision began to darken, his fingers grew numb.

“Calling you.”

Isaac couldn’t feel his hand any longer.

“More.” It said, it whispered, it offered him. “Don’t let go. Don’t look away. See me. Know me. Want me. Love me!” It yelled and screamed in his left ear as Isaac saw things and truths and past and futures that were and hadn’t been written yet. “He and I, time and space itself, are one in the void. All are connected. All truths are seen. All realities felt.”

Isaac wasn’t sure what it was. If it was the cracking of his reflection, the bright blue light that flashed or some other unseen force, but he had managed to pull away from the void artifact. His left eye remained looking at it. His left arm stolen away as Isaac cried out, touching at the void left behind.

What had been taken, what had been stolen from him.

All so that one day he would know what he needed to do.

And, here and now, on this ship as he faced towards Typhon with an artificial eye and a void symbiote for an arm, Isaac told Typhon the dark truth he had always been keeping from the Saberwolf.

“I’m going to die before you do.” Isaac said to him then, as the mirror had reflected to an eye that he didn’t have any longer. “One day, I will pass on. Be it from a crystallized shard in my chest burst out,” Isaac touched the spot where the metal plate on his chest was. “Or a bullet through the head,” Isaac looked up at him and Typhon jerked back seeing the empty socket where Isaac’s left eye should’ve been. “One day, I’ll be gone.”

Typhon’s ears folded back against his head and he averted his gaze away from Isaac’s as the Terran continued to pet over his hand.

“I don’t-,” Typhon began but Isaac stopped him.

“One day, when I’m gone… and you miss me so much, you can’t imagine going on any longer…? I need you to… That is, I heard…” Isaac licked his suddenly dry lips. “I heard about something, an artifact, that can turn back time…” Isaac said placing the final piece needed, the seed of doubt and information for Typhon to someday use in order to become the space pirate Cyclone to come searching for him. “An artifact that can allow us to meet again. An ancient void artifact that can turn back time.”

“Isaac, I don’t want to talk about this any longer.” Typhon said, stressing the words now.

“When that happens, take my eye.” Isaac reached up to touch the spot where his left eye is. “It’ll guide you… don’t worry,” he added on with a soft smile. “It can see through an eyepatch.”

“Isaac.” Typhon said louder.

“What is a space pirate without an eyepatch?” Isaac chuckled.

“Isaac!” Typhon practically shouted now, howling out that he needed to stop talking about this.

“Okay, Typhon… Okay. I just…” Isaac could see the look on Typhon’s face and knew then that he’d never have to worry about bringing this up or mentioning it ever again.

The message had been given. The solution given as the single, final, seed had been planted, waiting to be sowed.

One day, maybe a century from now, Isaac would be gone and Typhon, sitting by a shore on dark rocks, would remember this conversation they had together.

Remembering about an hourglass… to have an eye that would lead him there. To the X marked on the map of his mind. To a buried treasure, beneath the endless golden sands, on a forgotten planet that was stolen by a crazed Tigeron Emperor.

A void artifact. That could turn back time, for them to meet again.

The End and the Beginning.